The GAIN Power Powerful IDEA Awards platform allows our community to vote for the 2022 nominees until May 16th. The registration URL is https://powerfulidea.gainpower.org. PowerfulIDEA.vote goes to a page that shows all the nominations.

• 100+ awards fall under five categories: Talent, Organizations, Programs, Technology, and Communications. We also have a few special awards that will be announced later.
• We have a double nominee approval system due to nominees being submitted by third parties. A member of the GAIN Power team has reviewed all nominations to ensure they fit their category. Additionally, we requested individual or organization representatives approve their nominations. As of April 19th, there are 440+ approved nominees – with dozens more pending approval for various reasons. This means the number of nominees may change over the voting period.
• Voting is behind a registration wall. Everyone must register to vote. Anyone who registers can cast their vote for anyone and everyone once. This means you can vote for more than one person or organization per category but not more than one vote per nominee.
• This is not a Twitter poll. Voting is intended for our member community of people who identify as Progressive Political Professionals and activists. As a result, we require an email and registration. We ask a few screening questions as well. 
• Registration questions include race and gender identity. “Prefer not to answer”  is an appropriate response for those who do not want to share this information. We collect this to understand better who uses our platform and ensure our programs are representative.  These questions are intended for internal analysis and summary reporting; we do not use or share individual personal information.  
• Once logged in, you will see text at the top that says, “My voting assignments – Community Voting.” You do not have “assignments,” but this is a word that we can’t change or remove from the platform.
• Nominations came from individual nominees, community nominations and recommendations, and a staff committee that added some.  
• We can and will allow additional nominations. However, they will not receive additional time for voting. If you want to submit a late nomination, please email awards@gainpower.org or add them to this Typeform and we can help get them in – they can no longer be submitted directly.
• Some categories may still be merged – this might mean nominees are moved into a more broad category.
• Nominees can also update their nominations to add materials or information.  
• Nominees are allowed to vote. 
• GAIN Power staff and consultants will not cast any votes. 
• Judges will be allowed only to vote but will be recused from categories where they may have submitted nominees. 
• Individual Nominees have unique URLs to share with personal/professional networks. These can be found by searching for their names and nominations.
• Community voting will be open until May 15th. Please note this is a bit later than our original calendar. We will have a judged voting round after May 26th. The final awardees will be announced the following week before our award ceremony.
• Our awards ceremony will take place June 6th in Washington, DC. The following day, June 7th, we’ll host a career expo and campaign service market space.
• We use a technology platform called Award Force for the Powerful IDEA Awards. Much more information on the platform is available on their site.
• All questions about the nominees, categories, rules, and events should be submitted by email to awards@gainpower.org. This is a team account that is monitored by several of our staff. 
• Finally, if you’ve read all this, this is a big new program, and we are a small team. We will make mistakes. We hope to learn from them and improve as we go. Your feedback on all elements of this program will help us improve, so comments, questions, and thoughtful criticism are all welcome. Thanks for being part of this amazing community!
• We discovered a bug in the platform that has been resolved, but if you tried to vote and were not logged in – it did not redirect you to the login page which caused some confusion for users new to the system between 10 am – pm ET on 4/26. This has been resolved.

Please note we may update this post occasionally. Last update 4/26/23.