Dogwood Arts WIVK 107.7FM People's Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WIVK People's Choice Award is and who runs it

Dogwood Arts presents the WIVK 107.7FM People's Choice Award as the public favorite portion of its 2026 Chalk Walk. The organizer is a Knoxville, Tennessee arts organization whose program lineup spans tree orders, murals, gallery exhibits, public art and the flagship Dogwood Arts Festival, with the Chalk Walk among its spring events. The award's printed title carries the WIVK 107.7FM call sign, tying the honor to the Knoxville radio brand named beside it on the ballot page. Where most public votes in the region belong to newspapers or contest platforms, this one stays on the organizer's own domain: the participant gallery, the form and the result all sit at dogwoodarts.com.

The subject of the vote is artistic rather than commercial. Participants in the 2026 Dogwood Arts Chalk Walk create pavement artwork, and the page asks visitors to browse the list and vote for a favorite. That shapes the award as a best-of style honor inside a single arts event, closer to a festival audience prize than to a standing business directory.

Why the hosting arrangement matters

Because the vote never leaves the organizer's site, everything a supporter needs is printed in one place, and any change to the rules or the window would surface on that same page first. There is no third-party dashboard with separate terms to reconcile, which keeps the WIVK award unusually easy to read alongside the organizer's other Knoxville programming.

When the 2026 ballot ran and what the page leaves out

Only the 2026 cycle is established for this award. This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Within the 2026 cycle the printed window is precise. Voting ran from 10AM on Saturday, April 11th until 11:59PM on Thursday, April 16th. The opening day matches the date the organizer's own event listing assigns to the 2026 Chalk Walk itself, so the ballot went live as the pavement work appeared and remained open well past the event afternoon.

Two details never appear on the 2026 page. Dogwood Arts does not print an award-category breakdown beside the participant gallery, and no announcement of a following cycle had been posted alongside it. The timing of the result announcement is likewise absent.

Reading the closing hour correctly

The stretch between the Saturday morning opening and the Thursday night close gave supporters room to plan, but the end point is firm. Anyone checking a result or a late push should treat the printed close as the last word, since the organizer publishes no grace period or extension language.

How a supporter casts a ballot in this award

The mechanic is short enough to describe in full. A supporter loads the Chalk Walk 2026 page on dogwoodarts.com while the April window is open, scrolls the gallery of participating artists, chooses a favorite and completes the ballot form, supplying an email address on the way. Casting a ballot costs nothing, and the email is the unit the tally counts.

The printed rule reads "One vote per email address." Nothing on the page describes a sign-in step or a membership requirement; the email field is the only credential the rule turns on. Because each address carries a single ballot, the choice deserves thought before the form is opened, since there is no revision path printed anywhere.

What happens after submitting

The page prints no confirmation ritual beyond the submission itself, and no post-ballot instructions. The organizer handles the count and the announcement on its own side, which is why the closing hour rather than any voter action marks the real end of the cycle.

Where this ballot fits among Tennessee public votes

Tennessee has no shortage of public votes, and this one is set apart by its scale and setting. Elsewhere in the state sit the BroadwayWorld Nashville Awards and the BroadwayWorld Memphis Awards, theater-focused reader polls; the Chattanooga market carries CommunityVotes Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Times Free Press Best of the Best; and Knoxville itself fields Cityview Best of the Best and the Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes.

Against that backdrop, the WIVK award is the narrow one. It honors artists inside a single Dogwood Arts event rather than ranking businesses across a city, it runs on the organizer's own domain rather than a contest platform, and its window is a compact April stretch keyed to the Chalk Walk rather than a months-long survey season.

What makes the Knoxville chalk ballot different

For a Knoxville supporter, the practical difference is focus. Cityview's ballot and the Parade of Homes program spread across many local categories and businesses, while this award concentrates attention on the pavement artists of one spring event, with a rule set short enough to read in a minute and a result controlled entirely by Dogwood Arts.

Helping a favorite artist gather more ballots

Supporters who want a favorite Chalk Walk artist to finish on top work within the ballot's own design. The controlling constraint is the one-per-email rule, so outreach that reaches fresh email addresses matters far more than repeat prompts to the same people. Timing matters as well: the form stopped accepting ballots at 11:59PM on Thursday, April 16th, 2026, so any reminder had to land before that evening to count.

Dogwood Arts prints no policy on paid or organized voting help on the Chalk Walk page, so anyone weighing outside assistance should read that silence alongside the published rules rather than assume a blessing or a ban. General methods for widening a campaign's reach, from shareable direct links to reminder cadence, are gathered in how to get more votes online.