Best Of The Valley Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

A radio award that answers to its own publisher, not a ballot platform

Most Wisconsin best-of ballots look alike: a regional publication opens dozens of categories, a third-party voting service runs the form, and businesses campaign across the whole roster. The Best Of The Valley Award breaks that pattern in three ways at once. It belongs to a radio organization rather than a magazine or a chamber. It is published on the organizer's own website, thefamily.net, with no outside balloting service involved. And its one confirmed result is a single category, Local Radio Station, rather than a wide consumer roster.

WEMI operates the Family stations whose signals the ballot page itself lists: 91.9 in Appleton, 91.5 in Green Bay, 92.9/102.5 in Milwaukee, 88.5 in Central Wisconsin, 91.3 in Sheboygan and 99.9 in Eau Claire. The award sits inside that broadcast family's site, which means the ballot's rules, its calendar and its presentation are all decided by the publisher rather than by a platform vendor.

That contrast matters for anyone comparing Wisconsin ballots. A program such as Best of the Valley, Appleton runs on the YourChoice structure with many categories and a published framework. This award, by contrast, is a publisher's own recognition of its station's standing in the valley community, and the ballot page doubles as the winner announcement.

The dated history: two confirmed editions and a July 2024 result

Confirmed editions of the Best Of The Valley Award exist for 2024 and 2026. The 2024 cycle is the one with published detail: its results phase fell in July, and on July 29, 2024 the page announced that 91.9 FM The Family had won The 2024 Best of the Valley Community Choice Award for Local Radio Station.

That announcement is the program's clearest dated fact. It shows the award's shape, a community-choice honor in which listeners decide which local radio station wins, and it shows the organizer's habit of publishing results on the same page that carries the ballot. The 2026 edition is confirmed by the ballot's live presence that year, though WEMI has not printed the exact days a cycle opens or closes for either edition; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the confirmed history does not settle is the forward calendar. Two confirmed editions support calling the program recurring, but WEMI has not published a standing schedule, a nomination round date or a fixed month for future cycles. The 2024 July window is the only month confirmed so far, and a reader planning around the next edition should treat the ballot page, not this summary, as the calendar.

How a supporter votes on the WEMI ballot today

Voting happens as a straightforward public ballot that WEMI publishes itself. A supporter opens the best-of-the-valley-award-winner page on thefamily.net, reads the current cycle's instructions, selects their preferred entry and submits. Because WEMI hosts the ballot itself, there is no third-platform account wall of the kind some Wisconsin ballots put up; whatever verification the organizer wants appears on the page directly.

Three things about this ballot are genuinely unknown between cycles, and each is a gap WEMI's own page leaves open. No category roster appears on the ballot page, so nobody can know in advance whether the ballot carries more than the Local Radio Station category the 2024 result named. WEMI prints no vote cap and no per-supporter frequency rule, so the only safe guide is whatever limit the live ballot states. And the start and finish of a cycle is visible only when the ballot itself says so.

For a supporter, the practical sequence is short. Visit the confirmed URL, follow the ballot's own prompts, and respect any limit printed there. If the page shows a closed cycle, the result announcement usually sits in its place, as it did after the July 2024 win.

Where this ballot sits among Wisconsin's best-of programs

Wisconsin's best-of field is crowded, and this award's neighbours show how different its shape is. The YourChoice-structured ballots, such as Best of the Valley, Appleton and Best of the Bay, Green Bay, run broad multi-category rosters on a shared platform. Magazine-backed programs like Best of Madison and Best of Milwaukee, Readers' Choice put a publication's readership behind their ballots. Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards and Janesville CommunityVotes serve their own cities on similar community-vote frameworks.

Against that field, the Best Of The Valley Award is the odd one out. Its publisher is a radio organization, its home is the publisher's own domain, and its confirmed footprint is a single named category rather than a roster. A business or a listener who assumes the YourChoice rules apply here will be wrong on every count: the calendar, the categories and the mechanics all answer to WEMI alone.

That independence cuts both ways. It gives the ballot a simplicity the platform-run contests lack, one page, one vote, one result announcement. It also means fewer published guardrails, because a platform vendor's standard rules page does not exist here. The organizer's own ballot text is the whole rulebook.

Building support for a station in this award

Because this ballot is a single-category public vote on a radio station's own site, support campaigns look different from the multi-category pushes Wisconsin businesses run elsewhere. The audience is listeners, and the natural channel is the station's own signal: on-air mentions, social posts from the station community, and direct asks during the live window. A campaign that starts the day the ballot opens, rather than the day before it closes, spreads its asks across the whole cycle instead of piling them at the deadline.

WEMI has published nothing about outside help for this award, so the organizer's rules are unknown and the ballot's own text governs. What is always true of a public vote is that genuine listeners casting genuine votes are the support the award is designed to measure. For tactics that fit public ballots of this kind, our votes guide covers outreach, timing and reminder cadence in detail.