SCWBA Parade Of Homes | People's Choice Award | Wisconsin: How Voting Works & How to Win

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

The People's Choice Award is the visitor-voted prize attached to the Parade of Homes presented by the South Central Wisconsin Builders Association, better known as SCWBA. The parade covers the Janesville and Beloit area in south central Wisconsin, and the award lets the people who walk through the homes decide which entries impressed them most, rather than leaving the verdict to a judges' panel.

Everything about the ballot runs on the association's own site. The voting page sits at janesvilleparadeofhomes.com/vote/, and the ballot opens with a single instruction: log in to vote for your favorite parade homes by entering your ticket number. There is no third-party polling platform between the supporter and the vote, which is unusual among Wisconsin reader and fan ballots and worth knowing if you are comparing markets.

The association itself is a working organization with a public face: an office at 4102 Commercial Drive in Janesville, WI 53546, and a phone line at 608-752-8075. Its site carries the full parade apparatus, including a Home Showcase, a map search, a builders and landscapers directory, sponsor listings, ticket sales and an FAQ, so the People's Choice ballot is one piece of a larger event rather than a standalone poll.

The dated record: 2025, 2026 and the September window

SCWBA describes the Parade of Homes in its own words as "the Annual event presented by the South Central Wisconsin Builders Association," a line published on the association's about page. The People's Choice ballot rides along with that event, and the 2025 and 2026 parades both carried the award. On the evidence of those back-to-back years, the next cycle would be the 2027 parade.

The month is the firmest date the association gives: the parade and its ballot run in September. What the association has not published anywhere on its ballot pages is the precise day voting starts and the day it finishes; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters less than it would on a year-round poll, because the practical window is the tour itself, the stretch of September days when ticket holders are walking the route and scanning codes.

The 2025 edition gives a sense of scale: 21 homes on the route, built by 16 contractors. The association publishes the route and the builder lineup on its own site ahead of each parade, so the current year's count is always a matter of checking the showcase map rather than assuming the previous year's shape carries over.

One caution about the category slate: the ballot page itself does not restate it. The association's parade materials name Overall Design, Kitchen, Master Suite and Outdoor Space, and invite supporters to rate multiple categories, but the current slate is guaranteed to appear only on the live form itself.

How a supporter votes: tickets, QR codes and the rating form

The mechanic starts with a purchase. A supporter buys a parade ticket, through the site, by phone at 608-752-8075 or at the Janesville office, and that ticket number becomes the key to the ballot. The vote page says it directly: log in to vote for your favorite parade homes by entering your ticket number. No email account, no social login, no separate registration, just the number printed on the ticket.

From there the association has built the ballot into the tour itself. Each parade home carries a QR code, so the natural moment to vote is while standing in the kitchen or master suite being rated. Scanning the code takes the supporter to the ballot for that entry, and the parade materials encourage rating multiple categories per home rather than picking a single overall winner and moving on.

The second path is the ballot page itself. A supporter who prefers to rate after the tour, or who wants to finish the homes they missed, can go straight to janesvilleparadeofhomes.com/vote/, enter the ticket number and complete the ratings there. Both paths land on the same form, and both depend on the ticket, and that ticket gate is what sets this ballot apart from the open public polls that dominate the best-of space.

For a builder or landscaper with a home on the route, the practical consequence is that every rating corresponds to somebody who paid to walk through the front door. The QR code placement, the signage inside the home and the reminder to rate before leaving are all under the entrant's control, and they matter more than anything that happens after the tour ends.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Wisconsin's best-of field is crowded, and the People's Choice Award is the odd one out in it. The state's larger reader ballots, such as Best of Milwaukee and Best of Madison, run on media publishers with open online nomination and voting. The same is true of the YourChoice programs in Appleton, Eau Claire and Green Bay, and of Janesville CommunityVotes, which operates in SCWBA's own city.

What makes the People's Choice Award different is the gate. Every one of those open ballots can be voted from anywhere by anybody with a browser. SCWBA's ballot requires a parade ticket number, which ties each rating to a person who physically toured the homes in the Janesville and Beloit area during a September window. The voter pool is smaller, but each vote carries the weight of an actual visit.

For an entrant, that difference shapes strategy. In an open poll, reach matters most, and support can be rallied from any audience. Here, the audience is fixed by who bought tickets, so the work concentrates on the tour experience and on making the in-home QR code impossible to miss. It also means the award sits closer to a peer review among serious shoppers than to a popularity contest, which is exactly the framing a builder with a strong product wants.

Rallying support for your parade home within the rules

Because the ballot is ticket-gated, the supporters who can rate your home are the ones holding tickets, so the campaign is really a tour-day campaign. Put the QR code where people naturally pause, at the end of the walkthrough rather than the start, so the impression is complete before they scan. Train whoever staffs the home to mention the rating in the closing line of the tour. If SCWBA gives entrants a way to contact ticket holders, a short reminder after the visit is the obvious follow-up.

What the association has said about outside help is, so far, nothing: no published rule addresses purchased votes, vote farms or third-party promotion for the People's Choice Award, and the ballot page carries only the ticket-number instruction. That silence is not permission, and the safe reading is that SCWBA, like most award organizers, expects ratings to reflect genuine visitor impressions. Entrants weighing outside support should read the organizer's position first, then the general legality picture at is buying votes legal, and the mechanics of vote packages at award votes before deciding anything.