How to Nominate a Local Business (and why they don't need a big following to win)

There is a business you already thought of.

Somebody good. Somebody local. Somebody whose work you would vouch for to a stranger without hesitating. And if you have read about the Lift Up Local Fund and not put their name forward, there is a good chance it is because you did a calculation in your head and decided they would lose.

They do not have the followers. They do not have a mailing list. The place down the street with four thousand Instagram followers would out-vote them without trying, and you would have put your friend into a popularity contest they were never going to win.

That calculation is the single most common reason a nomination does not get made. It is also wrong, and the reason it is wrong is written on the fund page in nine words that almost nobody scrolls far enough to read.

What the page actually says

“We blend your votes with each nominee’s Growth Scorecard — need weighted heavier than reach.”

Votes count. Votes are not the decision. And when the two disagree, need wins — that is what weighted heavier means, and it is published in public precisely so it can be held to.

So the useful question is not can my friend win a vote. It is: what is on the other side of that scale, and how would anyone measure it?

Why a pure vote would pick the wrong business

The fund’s own explainer puts the problem plainly: “a popularity contest would just reward whoever has the biggest network, not the business that needs it most.”

That is not an abstract worry. Think about who actually holds the biggest local network. It is usually the business that is already doing fine. A place with four thousand followers has already solved the being-found problem — that is what having four thousand followers is. They are not the business this fund exists for.

A pure vote would systematically hand the lift to the businesses least changed by it. So the vote is one input, and a diagnostic is the other, and the diagnostic carries more weight.

What “need” actually means here

Not “are they struggling.” Struggling is a feeling, and a feeling cannot be weighed against a vote count in any honest way.

Need, in this fund, means something narrower and measurable: how much of this business’s problem is fixable by the specific work the fund does. That gets read off six places a customer actually looks, with one question asked of all six.

The category search — what a stranger types when they do not know the business by name.
The Google Business Profile — category, hours, phone, photos, and whether any of it is filled in.
Apple Maps — a separate index. Being right on Google buys nothing here.
The website — does it load, does it say the same thing as everywhere else, is there one of it or two.
The other directories — Bing, Yelp, the trade-specific ones, the ones the owner forgot they were on.
Reviews — sorted by date, not by rating.

And the question is never do they rank. Ranking is a competition, and a competition is just the popularity contest again with extra steps. The question is: does this business’s own information agree with itself in all six places?

That is not a competition. It is a maintenance state. It can be read in about twenty minutes, by anybody, for free, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with how many people follow the business.

What it looks like when a business fails it

Here is one that does — mine.

My own Google Business Profile is categorised as a branding agency, which is not a phrase anyone in Rochester types into a search box. There is no phone number on it. There are no hours. The most recent photo on it was 848 days old when I audited it on 26 August 2026, and nothing has been posted since. My company LinkedIn page has three followers. The Facebook page has one. The handle for my own business name on Instagram was still unclaimed by anybody, including me. And my profile on an agency directory sells an expensive enterprise brand partner while my own website sells fixed-price systems to small businesses — two different companies, same name.

I sell the fix for every one of those things. That is the point of showing you. Nobody’s follower count tells you their directory listings contradict each other. A diagnostic catches it; a vote never would.

Look at the shape of that list rather than any single item. Wrong category. Blank phone. Blank hours. Two-year-old photo. Two profiles describing two different companies. That shape is what the need column measures — not sympathy, not effort, not how much anyone deserves it. How many things are broken, and how many of them a fortnight of unglamorous work would close.

The uncomfortable implication, said out loud: a business with that shape and eleven customers who would vote for them is a better use of this fund than a business with a clean profile and a thousand.

One that isn’t mine

The fund’s explainer page has carried this since July, about the first business, then unnamed:

“Two websites were fighting each other. The business’s own information disagreed across twenty-plus online listings, and Apple Maps was quietly sending new customers to an address it had already left. A booking app was over-messaging clients to the point people noticed.”

Twenty-plus listings disagreeing with each other. Apple Maps routing new customers to a place the business had moved out of. Read it again and notice what is not in it — nothing about the quality of the work, nothing about how hard the owner is trying. Good business, loyal regulars, and the systems underneath had drifted the way systems do when there is nobody whose job it is to watch them.

That business is Tina’s Natural Nails, Hair & Spa, named on the fund page with her blessing as the first business lifted. Week-one fixes are live. Full results publish when the work closes — which is the promise on the page, and I am not going to get ahead of it by quoting numbers today.

A note on what can and cannot be promised

While we are being precise about measurement, one thing worth saying because it gets oversold everywhere else: Apple currently documents no route for merging duplicate listings. If a business has two pins on Apple Maps, there is no button, no form and nobody to email who can staple them together.

What can be done is claim the correct one, correct it, report the duplicate, and then say honestly that the duplicate is still outstanding. Anyone promising a merge is describing a button that does not exist. That belongs in a post about how businesses get assessed, because an assessment that quietly promises impossible fixes is not an assessment.

How to nominate

The entire form is a name and a city.

That is it. You are not committing the business to anything. They do not need to know it was you. There is no step two for you, and nominations stay open round after round rather than closing on a deadline.

Three things worth knowing before you do it:

Your own business counts. If the one that came to mind while reading this was your own shop, put yourself in. The page says so outright. There is nothing awkward about it.

It is not a charity and it is not tax-deductible. The fund runs through Zipline Creative, which is a local business, and every dollar is accounted for by a fractional CFO. That is stated on the page, because a fund that is vague about what it is does not deserve anyone’s money. Backers contribute, and every backer gets a vote.

You do not have to bring a crowd. That is the whole reason this post exists. Need is weighted heavier than reach. One person putting one name forward is a complete, valid, sufficient nomination.

Nominate a business you believe in →

And if you would rather skip all of that and just run the six checks on your own business this afternoon — do that instead. They are the same six either way, they are listed above in order, and nobody needs permission or a budget to look.

More on how the fund works, what “getting lifted” includes, and how we report back: How the Lift Up Local Fund Works.