Best of Portage County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Portage County Community's Choice Awards is

The Best of Portage County program exists to celebrate the best businesses and organizations in Portage County, Wisconsin through public nomination and voting. It is organized by the local Gannett paper of the USA TODAY Network serving the Stevens Point market, and the copyright line on the ballot belongs to USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures, which places it inside the same publishing family as the network's other community awards.

The ballot lives at yourchoiceawards.com/stevenspoint within Your Choice Awards. That single address carries the whole cycle: the nomination form, the voting round, and the winners section all hang off the same page, alongside a business resources area and an FAQ.

The vertical is what the platform calls a best-of ballot. Rather than a single prize, the program spreads recognition across a long list of categories, and the organizer says each year it recognizes over 450 businesses and organizations, all driven by public participation. Nominations decide who appears on the ballot, and voting then settles the finalists and the eventual winners per category.

Facts at a glance

The 2026 calendar and what is confirmed

The 2026 cycle is fully dated on the ballot page. It all begins with nominations: the nomination round ran March 2-23, 2026. Once nominations ended, the leading companies in every category moved forward into the voting round that ran May 4-18, 2026. After voting wrapped, the organizer set the winners announcement for July 12, 2026, with the page noting that excitement builds as the reveal is prepared.

Those three dates give the whole shape of a cycle: roughly seven weeks of nominations in early spring, a two-week public vote in May, and a July reveal. The promotion row attached to the ballot matches the voting window exactly, opening May 4, 2026 and closing May 18, 2026, and its status now reads closed.

On recurrence, confirmed runs appear for 2025 and 2026, and the organizer's own description says the program runs each year, recognizing over 450 businesses and organizations annually thanks to community involvement. That makes 2026 the second confirmed edition on this ballot, not the first.

One part of the picture is missing from the page, since the organizer has not printed eligibility rules for nominees or voters anywhere on it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The category lineup itself is also shown on the live ballot rather than restated here, since it can shift between cycles.

How a supporter votes in the Portage County ballot

Voting happens as a straightforward public poll inside Your Choice Awards at the Stevens Point address. During the voting round, a supporter opens yourchoiceawards.com/stevenspoint, browses the categories, and selects the Portage County business or organization they want to win. The organizer's stated rule is that users can vote up to once a day for their favorites to determine the winners, which turns the daily return into the habit that decides this ballot.

That daily limit is the single most useful fact for anyone backing a Stevens Point area business. A vote cast once has limited weight in a category with many nominees; the same supporter returning on each of the fourteen days between May 4 and May 18, 2026 multiplies their contribution without breaking any rule the organizer has printed.

The ballot page also carries a How It Works section, a Categories section, a Winners section, and Business Resources, so a first-time voter can find the category list and the current standings in the same place they cast a vote. A $250 prize promotion is attached to participation in the 2026 cycle, giving supporters an extra reason to take part.

Because the program is completely driven by public participation, in the organizer's words, no nomination or vote comes from the paper's editorial staff. Everything on the ballot, from the nominee list to the final winners in every category it carries, is decided by the community's own submissions.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Portage County's program is one of several community ballots the USA TODAY Network and partner publishers run across Wisconsin, and each answers to its own market. The closest structural cousins include Best of the Valley in Appleton and Best of the Bay in Green Bay, both of which share the Your Choice Awards system and the nominate-then-vote rhythm this page describes.

Other Wisconsin markets run their ballots under different names and sometimes different hosts. Best of Madison and Best of Milwaukee cover the state's two largest cities, while Eau Claire's Reader's Choice Awards and Janesville CommunityVotes serve smaller markets the way Portage County's ballot does.

What distinguishes the Stevens Point ballot is scale relative to its market. A program recognizing over 450 businesses and organizations across a long category list, in a county anchored by one city, gives nearly every kind of local business a slot to compete in, from restaurants to services to retail.

It also matters that the county name sits in the program title itself. Portage County exists in Wisconsin and in Ohio, but this ballot is unambiguously the Wisconsin one: its market label reads Stevens Point, WI, and its voting path lives under the stevenspoint segment of the Your Choice Awards domain.

Strengthening support for a Portage County nominee

For a business or organization on this ballot, the organizer's own rules point to what works. The stated mechanic allows a vote once per person each day through May 18, 2026, so the most effective move is a reminder campaign that reaches the same customers repeatedly across the two-week window, not a single announcement on day one.

Ground the ask in the ballot's own structure: tell supporters which of the ballot's categories the business is listed in, and give them the direct address, yourchoiceawards.com/stevenspoint, so nobody has to search for it. A daily nudge tied to something customers already do, like a morning coffee run, fits the once-a-day rule naturally.

Regarding outside help, this page describes the ballot rather than any service. Whatever a business considers, the organizer's public participation model and its daily limit are the rules any support has to live within, and the general options are compared at buy award votes.