KABOOM Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the KABOOM Awards are and who runs them

The KABOOM Awards are a best-of style ballot for family-friendly organizations in Columbia, South Carolina. The organizer is Kidding Around Columbia, a parenting publication serving the Columbia market, and the contest lives on the publication's own domain, with no outside voting platform involved. That detail shapes everything else about the ballot: the nomination form, the voting stage and the promotional materials for participating businesses all sit under the same roof at kiddingaroundcolumbia.com, and the ballot page itself carries the voting link.

The program's own pitch invites readers to pick their favorites and vote for their favorite family-friendly organizations in Columbia, SC. The name is a play on the publication's brand, and the vertical is a best-of format aimed at a narrower pool than a general readers' choice contest. Where a newspaper ballot spans restaurants, services and retail across a whole metro, this one centers organizations that serve families with children.

Because the organizer is also the publisher, the contest doubles as community content for its readers and as a marketing channel for the businesses that make the ballot. Participating organizations are told to contact [email protected] for promotional materials, which tells you the organizer expects the nominees themselves to campaign for votes.

The dated history of the KABOOM Awards

Confirmed editions of the KABOOM Awards ran in 2021, 2022, 2025 and 2026. The program is annual, and each cycle follows the same two-stage shape: a nomination round in which readers put favorite organizations forward, followed by an official voting ballot that decides the winners. The organizer's own instruction, "Nominate and then vote often!", describes that sequence in five words.

The 2026 cycle is the most precisely dated. Its Stage 2 voting window ran October 7-20, 2026, and the top 5-10 organizations in each category advanced from nominations to that official ballot. What the ballot page does not publish is the dating of the nomination round itself; Kidding Around Columbia has left those stage dates off the page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Two things follow from that timeline. First, the October voting window is the anchor of the calendar: a supporter or a business planning around the contest should treat early October as the period when daily voting matters most. Second, the gap between the 2022 and 2025 editions means the program's history is not a continuous year-by-year run, so any claim about unbroken annual operation would go beyond what the confirmed years show. The 2026 edition is the latest confirmed cycle, and the ballot page is where the next cycle's dates will appear first.

How a supporter votes in the KABOOM Awards today

The vote is a straightforward public ballot with a daily return built in. The printed rule on the voting form is "You may vote once per day in each category." That means one supporter can cast a vote in every category on the ballot in a single day, and then come back the next day and do it again until the stage closes. For a family that loves a particular children's activity center, a daily visit across the October window is the single most effective thing they can do.

The sequence starts before the vote. Nominations come first, and only the top 5-10 organizations in each category reach the official voting ballot. So a business that wants a place on the October ballot needs its supporters active in the nomination stage, not just the voting stage. The organizer's own line, "Nominate and then vote often!", is aimed at exactly that behavior.

Everything happens at the KABOOM Awards ballot page on the publication's own site. There is no separate platform to learn, no third-party app to install, and the voting URL is the same address readers already know from the publication. A supporter who wants to go beyond the daily return can read how to get more votes online for tactics that work on nomination-based local ballots like this one.

How the KABOOM Awards sit beside their South Carolina neighbours

South Carolina offers many best-of ballots, and the KABOOM Awards differ from every ballot around them in the same two ways: the organizer is a parenting publication, and the nominee pool is family-friendly organizations rather than the general business landscape. The Best of South Carolina Awards and the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards cover the state or the performing arts from their own publishers, while the KABOOM ballot stays focused on Columbia families.

Within Columbia itself, the nearest neighbours are the two Best of Columbia ballots, run by Columbia Metropolitan and by Free Times. Those are classic readers' choice contests with broad category lists. The Best of Charleston and Charleston Magazine's Best Of serve a different city entirely, so a business comparing markets should treat them as parallel programs, not competitors for the same votes.

What makes the KABOOM Awards distinct in practice is the two-stage structure on the organizer's own site. A newspaper ballot usually opens straight into voting; this one makes supporters nominate first, which means early-season visibility decides who even appears on the October ballot. For a family-friendly organization in Columbia, that makes the KABOOM Awards a different campaign from a general best-of entry, with a narrower audience that is also a better-fit audience for what the business does.

Strengthening support for a KABOOM Awards nominee

A campaign on this ballot has two levers, and both come from the organizer's own structure. The first is the nomination stage: an organization that is not among the top 5-10 in its category never reaches the voting ballot, so rallying supporters early is not optional. The second is the daily rule, one vote per day in each category, which rewards a reminder system over a single announcement. A business that emails its list on day one and never again will lose to one that reminds families every morning of the window.

The organizer also expects nominees to campaign. The ballot page invites participating organizations to request promotional materials from [email protected], so the sanctioned path to more votes runs through the organizer itself. Anything outside that path should be measured against the printed daily rule, and against the general picture in our award-votes guide, before a business commits to it.