Best of the Valley, PA Community’s Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of the Valley, PA Community’s Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best of the Valley, PA Community’s Choice Awards celebrates the best businesses and organizations in the Beaver Valley, and the community itself decides who wins. It sits in the best-of vertical: the kind of ballot a local paper runs so its readers, not a judging panel, choose which restaurant, plumber, salon or nonprofit earns the title.

The organizer is a Gannett / USA TODAY Network local paper, and the copyright line on the ballot page reads USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures. The program is hosted on the Your Choice Awards platform, the ballot system Gannett markets use for community choice contests, and the Beaver Valley edition lives at yourchoiceawards.com/beaver/. That address is the live ballot, not a promotional landing page, and it is where every phase of the cycle plays out.

Scale is substantial for a single market. The ballot page states that each year the program recognizes over 400 businesses and organizations, all driven by public participation. That breadth is what makes the ballot useful to such a wide spread of local employers and shops, since the category field stretches across the whole Beaver Valley economy.

Nominations and voting are both open to the public. The organizer describes the program as completely driven by community involvement, beginning with nominations, with voting then determining the finalists and winners in each category.

The 2026 dates, the edition record and what the ballot does not publish

The 2026 cycle ran in three dated phases. The nomination round opened February 6 and closed February 27, 2026, and the organizer frames it as the start of everything: it all begins with nominations. After nominations closed, the top five nominees in each category moved on to the voting round, which ran April 15 to 29, 2026. Once voting ended, the winners were announced on July 9, 2026.

The program is annual. The ballot itself confirms edition years 2025 and 2026, and a 2020 community post from a local nonprofit describes being a finalist in the 2020 Best of The Valley, Beaver's Official Community Choice Awards, so the series was running at least that early. A 2027 cycle is the natural expectation, with the organizer publishing fresh nomination and voting windows on the ballot page as each year begins.

One thing the ballot page does not carry is the full roster of category names. The count is referenced, but the individual category list is not printed in the text a nominee can read in advance; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same applies to any eligibility fine print beyond the published daily-vote rule and the sweepstakes threshold, neither of which is spelled out further on the page.

For a business deciding whether to campaign, the practical takeaway is the shape of the calendar: a February write-in window, an April voting window of roughly two weeks, and a mid-summer reveal. That spacing is what a Beaver Valley nominee has to plan around.

How a supporter votes in the Beaver Valley ballot today

Voting here is a plain public ballot with a daily twist. During the voting round, a supporter opens the Beaver Valley page at yourchoiceawards.com/beaver/, picks a category, chooses one of the five finalists and submits. The organizer's stated rule is that you can vote once a day per category when the voting round is active. That means a single supporter is not limited to a single vote across the whole round: the same person can come back on each following day of the window and vote again in the same category.

For a nominee, this is the single most important fact about the ballot. A voting window like April 15 to 29 in 2026 means one loyal customer is worth a vote every day, not one vote total. A business that simply asks once at the start of the round leaves most of that value on the table; one that reminds its customers each morning of the window multiplies the same goodwill.

The organizer also attaches a sweepstakes. Anyone who votes in 25 or more categories becomes eligible to win a $250 prize. That gives supporters a reason to browse the whole ballot rather than voting in one category and leaving, which indirectly helps every nominee on the page.

No purchase is involved at any stage. Voting is free, the sweepstakes is the organizer's own incentive, and the winners are revealed publicly on July 9 in the 2026 example, once the tally is complete.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Beaver Valley is one market inside a crowded Pennsylvania best-of field, and this page's sibling programs show how different the publishers are. Best of Berks (Berks County Living Magazine) answers to a magazine publisher in Reading's county. Best of Philly (Philadelphia Magazine) covers the state's largest city under a city magazine. Best of the 'Burgh runs the Pittsburgh equivalent, the closest large-market neighbour to Beaver Valley geographically.

Further east and north, Best of the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh Valley Style) serves the Allentown area, Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice covers Philadelphia's suburban counties, and Erie Reader Best of Erie serves the far northwest. None of these share a ballot with Beaver Valley; each is its own program with its own publisher, dates and rules.

What distinguishes the Beaver Valley edition is the combination of a national newspaper group behind it and a genuinely local scale: over 400 businesses and organizations recognized each year in a market far smaller than Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. The Your Choice Awards platform also gives it a standardized two-phase structure, nominations then a top-five voting round, which not every independent Pennsylvania ballot follows.

A business with customers spread across western Pennsylvania should treat each of these ballots separately. Winning in Beaver Valley earns a title there and nothing elsewhere, and each program's window opens on its own schedule.

Strengthening support in a daily-vote Beaver Valley ballot

Because the organizer allows one vote per category per day, the campaigns that win in Beaver Valley are the ones built on repetition, not one big ask. A nominee's practical sequence is simple: confirm the voting window the moment the ballot page publishes it, tell every customer exactly which category to find you in, and then remind them daily for the length of the round. Across a window like April 15 to 29, 2026, a daily reminder turns one supporter into a vote every single day.

The sweepstakes does part of the work for you. Since voting in 25 or more categories enters supporters for the $250 prize, a business can honestly tell its customers that browsing the full ballot is worth their time, then ask for their vote in its own category while they are there.

On outside help: the organizer runs a free public vote and publishes its own daily rule, and any purchased votes would sit outside the community participation the program says it is driven by. If that option is on your mind, the award-votes page explains the general market, but the organizer's rules, not any vendor, decide what counts on this ballot.