Best of Prince William: How Voting Works & How to Win

154,000 votes. 19,000 voters. One April.

Eight votes per voter, on average. That is what falls out of InsideNoVA's own 2025 numbers for Best of Prince William: more than 154,000 votes cast by over 19,000 individual voters, all inside a single public-voting window that runs the entire month of April. Most contests this size report a vote total and stop there. InsideNoVA published both halves of the fraction, and the ratio says something the raw total alone doesn't: people who show up don't vote once and leave. They work through categories.

That matters for how a Prince William business should think about April. A nominee isn't fighting for attention against every other voter in the county — it's fighting for a slice of the roughly eight category-votes each of those 19,000 people is already going to cast. Get in front of a supporter once, in the right category, and there's a good chance that same person votes in several others that month anyway.

For other county-level contests across the state, see the Virginia contest hub. Prince William isn't the only Northern Virginia county running a program like this, either, a point worth returning to below.

194 categories means 194 small races, not one

Nominate, then vote. That two-stage structure is what turns a single county contest into 194 separate contests running under one banner. A category has to survive nominations before it ever reaches the ballot voters see in April, so the real competitive work happens earlier than most people assume.

What that means for a nominee

A business competing in, say, a specific dining subcategory isn't measuring itself against the full 154,000-vote total. It's measuring itself against however many votes land in that one category, from however many of the 19,000 voters happen to care about it. A smaller category with fewer nominees can be more winnable on a modest supporter base than a crowded one with a bigger total — the county-wide numbers don't tell a nominee which situation it's in.

Locking in the right category during nominations is the single most consequential decision in the whole cycle, made before a single April vote is cast. For a working framework on running any award-style campaign around a fixed ballot like this, see award-style vote campaigns, and for businesses specifically in food service, restaurant vote campaign planning covers category selection in more depth.

The June 26 print edition is the citation that holds up

Newspapers still matter here. InsideNoVA doesn't just post a results page and move on — it prints the Best of Prince William winners in a specific dated edition, June 26. That's a small detail with a real practical use: a winner claiming a category result has an actual, checkable citation available, not just a screenshot of a webpage that could change.

"Best of Prince William 2025, [category], InsideNoVA, June 26 edition" is a claim someone can go verify. A generic "as seen in InsideNoVA" line, with no category or date attached, is not. The gap between those two statements is the difference between a credible award claim and one that reads as inflated.

So the practical sequence for any business running this cycle: nominate correctly, drive real supporter turnout across the April window, then wait for the specific print edition before using any winner or placement language publicly. Because InsideNoVA controls the ballot itself and 194 categories are each judged on their own vote count, the only outreach that holds up afterward is the kind aimed at people who'll actually click through and vote — see how legitimate vote-getting campaigns work for that standard applied to a ballot like this one.

Manassas, Woodbridge, and the rest of the county aren't one audience

Prince William County is not a single neighborhood with one shared customer base. Manassas and Manassas Park sit at the county's western edge with their own identity as independent cities; Woodbridge and Lake Ridge run along the eastern side near the Occoquan; Gainesville and Haymarket have grown fast on the newer, more suburban western corridor; Dumfries and Occoquan carry more of a small-town, riverside feel. A business drawing customers from one of these areas shouldn't assume the same message lands the same way across all of them.

None of that changes the ballot instructions. It changes what a business says before sending anyone to it — a reminder aimed at Occoquan foot traffic reads differently than one aimed at a Gainesville subdivision Facebook group, even though both point at the exact same category and the exact same link.

What Best of Prince William is not

It isn't the only Northern Virginia best-of program, and it isn't run by the same people as the one next door. Arlington, roughly thirty miles northeast, runs its own separate Best of Arlington survey through Arlington Magazine — different sponsor, different category list, different results calendar. A win, nomination, or placement in one program says nothing about standing in the other, and the two never share a ballot. See Best of Arlington for how that program compares.

It also isn't a pay-to-win contest. InsideNoVA controls the ballot at va.secondstreetapp.com directly, and no purchase adds extra votes on the organizer's own form. What a business can legitimately do is make sure real customers, staff, and neighbors know the exact category and the exact link during the April window, the same thirty days that already produced 154,000 votes from people who didn't need convincing to show up. For the general mechanics behind that kind of outreach, see getting votes for an online contest, the broader online contest voting guide, and what's legal to do around contest voting.