Written by: Gary Davies

This is now the third year for Best of Calgary and each year we see the interest in our project grow and grow. Our main area of focus this year was to ensure that we received votes from all corners of the city. This way, we know that the results truly represented the views of Calgarians far and wide.

Now to achieve this goal, we knew that we needed to reach as many Calgarians as possible. Through promotional efforts with our media partners and our own social media connections, we doubled down and advertised the voting period like mad. And just like that, we hit a new record for the number of people to fill out the 2018 version of the Best of Calgary survey – nearly 13,000.

To measure where participants resided in Calgary, we depended on the voters willingness to share this information. While this wasn’t a mandatory field in our survey, we were thrilled that the large majority of Calgarians agreed to tell us what area of the city they call home. As a result, we’re happy to report that out of 239 total communities/areas in our city, we received votes from residents of 215 communities – or 90% of the city. Here's the breakdown:

The Most Active Voting Communities Overall:

· Beltline

· Bridgeland

· Mission

· Hillhurst/Kensington

· Inglewood

All of these are considered ‘inner-city communities’ and they tend to skew younger on the demographic scale.

The Most Active Southwest Voting Communities:

· Aspen Woods

· Mount Royal

· West Springs

· Killarney

· Springbank Hill

Outside of the core, these communities along with the Southeast were the next largest contributors to this year’s voting process.

The Most Active Southeast Voting Communities:

· Cranston

· Copperfield

· East Village

· Lake Bonavista

The Most Active Northwest Voting Communities:

· Bowness

· Tuscany

· Varsity

· Brentwood

· Cougar Ridge

· Crescent Heights

· Edgemont

The Most Active Northeast Voting Communities:

Renfrew
Marlborough
Temple
Bridgeland

The Most Active Voting Communities Outside of Calgary:

· Chestermere

· Okotoks

And lastly, with some small representation:

· Cochrane

· Bearspaw

Well Calgary we’ve tabulated the results and we’re pulling together content on our 100 category winners for 2018 as I write this. Mark your calendars, our results will be launched on May 1st on this very site. We thank you for your votes and we look forward to sharing the winners with you soon.

Gary Davies is a co-founder of Best of Calgary