Discover Green Bay: small city with a big heart

GREEN BAY, WI- (WGBW) – Compared to other cities with an NFL Franchise, Green Bay is small. Nick Meisner the Vice President of Digital Marketing for Discover Green Bay said we’re small…but mighty. 

“So many times you hear, ‘Oh, the smallest market in professional sports.’ Yeah, that is true. And we don’t shy away from that. It’s what makes us who we are,” Meisner said. “But we are also a large enough, vibrant enough, passionate enough community that 6.3 million throughout the year came to visit Green Bay in 2023.” 

In 2023, Green Bay was named the Best Place to Live by US News. The city dropped from that position in 2024 but is still in the Top 12. Meisner said the city has the unique ability to be both small and large.

“We’re a small enough place where people from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison can come up and kind of get away from the hustle and bustle of a really big city,” Meisner explained. “Whereas people from the U.P. and Northern Wisconsin come, and we’re their retail destination and healthcare destination. We’re the city that they are going to.”

Online websites and blogs such as Buzzfeed provide anecdotal evidence that people may want to move to a city they’ve visited as tourists, a theory Meisner subscribes to. 

“How many of those visitors are the teachers, or the nurses, or the doctors, or the construction workers, or those key jobs that we need for the infrastructure of our community? Those visitors could be that next crop of employees,” said Meisner.

Meisner was a guest on Civic Media’s Lean Local with Jim Schmitt airing Sundays on WGBW. Find it at Civic Media.us.