Neil Thompson
The Delegate Wranglers

 

 

 

With 25 years’ experience in the event industry, Neil has worked for large corporates, communication agencies, and operated his own freelance event management business from 2005 until 2019 – organising and managing mostly pharmaceutical events all over the world.

Neil founded The Delegate Wranglers Facebook group in 2014 with the simple ethos being that members can share the huge expanse of information, expertise and experience that industry friends, peers and colleagues all have.  Since then, under careful, friendly and positive management the group has organically grown to over 21,000 highly engaged members with million of pounds of business being traded on the group every month, as well as countless connections, advice and information being passed between each other. It well and truly has it’s finger on the pulse of the industry.

During lockdown, The Delegate Wranglers became the go-to place for it’s members, by being a place for unconditional support, industry information and guidance, as well as offering nearly all of it’s services for free – job listings, event promotion, press releases and a free weekly up-skilling session (The DW Live Show) for 60+ episodes. 

 

 

 

 

In 2019 Neil was named as M&IT Magazine’s Personality of the Year and more recently named as runner-up in 2021. The group achieved ‘Facebook Official Community Managed Partner’ status which gives Neil regular contact with Facebook HQ to help develop and grow his community as well as providing Facebook with regular feedback and involvement in alpha tests and product developments. More recently the group was added to the Facebook Community Accelerator Program in 2021 as one of only 131 communities worldwide to achieve this status. This gave the group access to coaching, product development, funding, project startups, speaking opportunities and more. From this, the event industry party, WranglersFEST 2022 was borne (which took place in the summer of last year) to well and truly reconnect the industry for hundreds of event professionals.

 

Neil also speaks regularly on the circuit and in June 2020 was invited by Facebook to speak on a panel session at Createch (part of London Tech Week) which was moderated by, VP of Facebook Europe, Nicola Mendelsohn and has since moderated or spoke to hundreds of live audiences, including being part of the Facebook Communities Summit in 2022 which was hosted by Mark Zuckerberg.