MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT

Message from the President & CEO

“To be a champion, I think you have to see the big picture. It’s not about winning and losing; it’s about everyday hard work and about thriving on a challenge. It’s about embracing the pain that you’ll experience at the end of a race and not being afraid. I think people think too hard and get afraid of a certain challenge.”

-Summer Sander

It is my pleasure to present the Operational Plan for Visit Jackson’s Fiscal Year 2023. Within these pages, you will find contemplated and vetted strategies that our experiences and research best positions Mississippi’s Capital City for heightened maximum OPPORTUNITY for the continued growth of the Jackson Tourism Industry and its Destination Management Organization.

During Fiscal Year 2022 I am honored to report that our positioning as a more destination inclusive and holistic agency has yielded qualitative success and qualitative key performance indicators that our Board of Directors challenged our team, just one year ago. Recent findings presented at the 2022 Destination International Convention confirm that the data-based tactics we embraced last fiscal year are now industry best practices and that our counterparts from across the globe are too utilizing similar strategies to remain valued and relevant.

Last year this time, we knew that the Coronavirus Global Pandemic would continue to be a significant factor that the global travel industry should be prepared to embrace. Our public health practices and associated tactics will remain fluid. We will continue to rely on the recommendations from the national and global health community to continue to welcome visitors in a safe and responsible manner.

In the spirit of transparency… What I did not consider was the realities of local politics and decades of neglected priorities that now impede the marketability of a grand and beautiful city celebrating its Bicentennial. Public safety, crumbling infrastructure issues, “brain-drain”, the challenge of the status quo systems that devalue socially and economically marginalized populations, and a fractured relationship between City Hall and the State Capital Building; these issues lie on the fringe of what a traditional DMO embraces, however, if COVID-19 taught us nothing else, be prepared to embrace change. In the upcoming year, Visit Jackson will remain engaged and where appropriate, serve as a resource and bridge to support our City Leadership and State Electorate resulting in a strong Capital City with a vibrant tourism outlook.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

During FY 2022-2023, Visit Jackson will utilize two methodologies to drive our continued quest for OPPORTUNITY. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s The Butterfly Effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system; and, his Chaos Theory, an interdisciplinary scientific theory, and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws, of dynamical systems, that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, that were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.

Our ongoing commitment to our stakeholders is to remain focused in the upcoming year to merge OPPORTUNITY with Change to Impact our destination. I thank our passionate Board of Directors for their continued dedication to ensuring that our work is successful and like Sanders and King, Jr. we remain committed to assuring that nothing stands in the pathway of success of our tourism industry.

Rickey L. Thigpen

Rickey L. Thigpen, PhD

President & CEO

Visit Jackson