In February 2024, we kicked-off our first annual Kids’ Pick Awards competition for Greater Portland. The month-long voting period was preceded by a public nomination process. In fact, most aspects of the awards were molded by a public process! Individuals were asked to vote only once per business/organization, per category. Over 13,000 votes were verified.
The local business community and parents, alike, showed such strong support for this new awards program, in it’s inaugural year, that we decided to offer our first annual Kids’ Pick Awards event on May 18th, 2024 at Ketcha Outdoors in Scarborough. The event is being offered in partnership with Ketcha Outdoors and the support of a growing list of local sponsors (see list below).
At the event, we plan to recognize and celebrate the top 3 businesses and/or organizations in each category. The event will also serve as an opportunity to support the Locker Project. We will have a raffle with 100% proceeds going to the Locker Project. This organization has a very special mission of helping to feed food-insecure children and their families in the Greater Portland area. For more information, or to donate, visit mainelockerproject.org. To donate an item to the event raffle, email Lisa.
Sponsors
Thank you to our growing list of sponsors for helping to make this event possible. This is truly a community effort and what an amazing community it is! Please contact Lisa if you’d like to become a Kids’ Pick Awards sponsor.
Event Partner:
Lead Sponsors:
- Castles in the Sky Events
- MePowered Pastries
- Amanda Huebner Photography
- Charcutemarie
- Balloon Decor by Laur
- SugarME
Silver Sponsors:
Bronze Sponsors:
- Baby Booty
- Centerpoint Martial Arts
- Dunstan Tap & Table
- Just for Kids Pediatric Dentistry
- Maine Happy Glampers
- Southern Maine Pediatric Dentistry
- Studio for the Living Arts Dance Complex
2024 Results
The 2024 results will be published on this page following the May 18th event. Want to experience the results live? Click here to purchase tickets!
Kids’ Pick Awards: Background Info
Stemming from a simple idea of how we could bring more positivity and support to the Greater Portland kid-friendly community, it really all started coming together in early January 2024, when we began asking the public to weigh-in and help shape the program. With some input from local parents (and their kids) and local business owners, by mid- January, we had ironed out 40 different categories for voting. For a week preceding the voting, we allowed the Greater Portland community to submit their nominations across all of these categories, which would help streamline the voting process in February.
February 1st: Voting was opened with a simple voting page containing 40 (optional) categories to vote on, with dropdowns to all nominees and write-in capability. The new competition was promoted through Instagram, Facebook and by shared within our collaborative network of local businesses and engaged local parents. After a week, we took any businesses and organizations that received multiple write-in votes and added them to the voting page dropdowns as nominations as well. Voting concluded on February 29th. We allowed one vote per business/organization, per category, per email address. This means that any one person was allowed to vote only one time for their favorite business or organization in any given category, but they could technically vote for 2 businesses in any given category if they wanted to.
In March we verified over 13,000 votes! Every single category was competitive and received strong numbers for at least the top 3 businesses or organizations. Voting in a lot of categories was very close, and in some cases numbers were exactly the same! While we originally planned to release the results to the public by April, the the enthusiasm surrounding the contest gave us the confidence to move forward with an event and to let that serve as the first official announcement of the top 3 results for each category.
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