West Michigan's Favorite Tattoo Artist (WGRD-FM): How Voting Works & How to Win

3,000 nominations, twenty finalists, and a six-and-a-half-day vote in 2018

The confirmed 2018 edition of this WGRD-FM contest is unusually well-documented for a radio-station fan poll. The station's own recap states it received "over 3,000 nominations" for the title, then narrowed that field to a top twenty. Voting itself ran from 12 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2018 until 11:59 p.m. the following Monday, September 17, just under six and a half days.

That's the kind of specific, dated number this niche rarely publishes, and it's worth stating plainly: a contest that draws 3,000 nominations for a single, non-business category, one tattoo artist, not fifty award slots, is a genuinely large fan turnout for a regional radio audience.

Anyone campaigning this year should treat the 2018 numbers above as historical evidence of scale, not as this year's actual schedule; the live wgrd.com ballot is where this year's actual window needs confirming.

Worth flagging for anyone searching this up: both the 2018 URL and a separately confirmed 2020 edition address still resolve, so an old bookmark or a search result pointing at either past year isn't necessarily broken. It's just not this year's page. Confirm you're on the current wgrd.com listing before trusting anything it says about who's a finalist.

One tattoo artist, not a business ballot: how this differs from West Michigan's other 'best of' programs

Grand Rapids Magazine runs its own Best of GR ballot, and the wider Detroit-market readers'-choice programs work the same way, asking voters to pick winners across dozens of business categories. WGRD's contest does the opposite: one single subject, tattoo artist, with a field the station itself narrows from thousands of nominations down to twenty names before the public ever votes. That's a fan-vote format closer to a bracket than a business directory.

The station's own site files the contest under its regular news tags, not a dedicated contest section. The page carries the labels "Grand Rapids News," "Michigan News," "West Michigan News," and a rotating "West Michigan's Favorite More From" tag. That last one is a small but real clue: it points to WGRD's on-air identity as a station, not a standalone contest brand, which matters if a supporter is trying to find this year's page through a search engine rather than a bookmark.

What the "top twenty" cut means for campaign math

Twenty finalists splitting whatever the total 2018 vote count turned out to be (not published anywhere on wgrd.com) is a materially different race than a two- or three-way runoff. A finalist doesn't need to out-mobilize the entire nomination pool, just the other nineteen names on the same ballot, and a concentrated push from a shop's actual regular clients counts for more in a field this size than it would in a hundred-category business ballot where votes spread thin.

A confirmed annual pattern, an unconfirmed exact calendar

Archived pages also show wgrd.com's tattoo-artist contest live in 2026, both under the 2018 URL and the separate 2020 address. What that doesn't tell us is whether the exact Tuesday-to-Monday window from 2018 repeats on the same days each year, or just the same general September slot.

So plan around September broadly, not around September 11 specifically. Confirm the actual open and close dates on the live wgrd.com page before telling a tattoo shop's clients an exact closing date that hasn't been confirmed yet.

Turning 3,000 nominations into twenty finalists into an actual campaign

A shop that made this year's top twenty already survived the hardest part, the nomination cut, from a field the station says topped 3,000 names. What's left is a straightforward ask: real clients, past and current, contacted directly and asked to vote once during the live window, not a mass share hoping strangers click through.

No vote cap, per-day limit, or eligibility rule is published anywhere on wgrd.com, so don't tell clients they can vote unlimited times, or promise a specific daily allowance the station hasn't confirmed. A shop owner unsure where the legal line actually sits on paid or bulk voting should read is buying votes legal before committing a marketing budget to it, and award vote campaign planning walks through how a business builds that kind of push around a fan-vote deadline rather than a business-category ballot. Compare that against Detroit Community Choice Awards and Grand Rapids Magazine's own Best of GR, two very different Michigan formats running the other kind of ballot, dozens of business categories instead of one fan-vote subject.