Interview With Elizabeth Russell

Elizabeth Russell is the in-market strategist with the Tupelo Convention and Visitors Bureau, a job she’s had for the past 10 years.  She works with the bureau’s partners: the hotels, restaurants and live music venues in Tupelo that have a stake in tourism.

Team building is her mission, and she regularly assembles coalitions with outside groups to bring visitors to the city. She also strategizes with area partners to develop long-range plans for tourism in Tupelo. Russell is a recent graduate of MSU Extension’s Excellence in Tourism Certification Program and earned her certificate in October 2025.

“I was attending the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism,” she said of her experience with the certification program, “and I heard a presentation about the Excellence in Tourism program by Rachael Carter from the Extension Service. My job with the Tupelo Convention and Visitors Bureau is all about partnering with affiliated groups and building coalitions, so the curriculum she outlined sounded like something I could really use.

The program places a strong emphasis on leadership, and Russell cited the sessions on techniques for working with tourism partners as being particularly helpful.

“There were presentations on how to recognize and deal with some of the personalities often encountered in work settings,” she said. “We talked about some common personality types and how they respond to certain situations. We discussed how to take this into account when trying to motivate partners to work toward a common goal.”

The first step toward attaining a common goal, she said, is to give it a clear definition.

“The program placed a great deal of emphasis on focusing on a destination,” Russell said. “Setting clear goals is a big part of the leadership training component. While that may seem obvious, sometimes it is so obvious that it’s easy to overlook.”

She says the certification program introduced her to a concept designed to lay out the steps to reach a goal once it’s been clearly defined. She recalled her first year of certification training during the Mississippi Tourist Association Spring Summit, when an instructor did a session focusing on ‘asset mapping.’

“It’s a process of looking at all the assets in a community and figuring out how to best use them, to most effectively package them to put them out in front of potential visitors to your community,” she said.

But asset mapping didn’t stop there. The participants were encouraged to take things a step farther -- what’s known in business jargon as thinking outside the box.

“We were taught to not only assess what we have, but also to think about what we need and which missing assets we have a reasonable expectation of obtaining,” Russell said.

It didn’t take long until she had an opportunity to put the concept of asset mapping to practical use. She recognized a way to add a missing asset to the Tupelo Elvis Festival.

“In our second year, we had a to organize a class project based on a specific area of study. The Tupelo Elvis Festival was coming up, and my project became the ‘King of the Soul’ activation,” she said. “I worked on it for six months. I partnered with Stax Museum out of Memphis, and together we set up the Soul Mobile, a traveling exhibit, gift shop, and DJ booth designed to take the Stax Records experience on the road. They set it up here during the Elvis festival, and it gave our visitors an additional activity, an attraction within an attraction.”

Russell encourages anyone thinking about enrolling in the Excellence in Tourism Certification Program to follow through.

“It was a wonderful experience for me,” she said, “and I have encouraged several of my partners in the tourism industry to take a hard look at it. They do a great job with programming with lots of interesting topics and instructors who can really speak to them. It’s focused on leadership, but it also gives you a set of specific skills you need in your toolkit. I’d highly recommend it.”