Every number here represents a community organization that reached an audience it could not have reached on its own budget.
Impact in this kind of work is easy to overstate. Here is what our numbers actually mean.
This counts distinct community events that we published, promoted, or produced marketing material for. It does not count repeat listings of a recurring event, and it does not count events we merely knew about. If an organization received nothing from us, it is not in the number.
This is combined reach across the channels we control: the community calendar, our mailing list, and our social distribution. Reach is not attendance, and we do not present it as such. It is the number of people who had the opportunity to see something they otherwise would not have.
The majority of what we deliver is provided at no charge to the receiving organization. Some services are offered at low cost where a group has capacity to contribute. No organization has ever been turned away over inability to pay, and no service is priced to make a margin.
We do not claim credit for the events themselves. The festivals, exhibits, fundraisers, and classes are produced by community organizations doing difficult work with almost no resources. Our contribution is narrow and specific: we make sure people find out. Any impact figure we publish should be read as a measure of visibility delivered, not of programming produced.
Four recurring patterns in what member organizations come to us for.
A cultural celebration takes eight months to plan and gets promoted the week before, because nobody on the organizing committee has time to think about marketing until the logistics are settled. We take that over months in advance, so the promotion runs on its own schedule rather than competing with the event build.
A group has run programs for years and has almost no usable images of its own work. That absence quietly blocks grant applications, press coverage, and social media. Documentation is unglamorous and it changes what an organization is able to ask for.
An event reliably draws the same two hundred people. Everyone who attends already knew about it before it was announced. Our distribution exists to push past that boundary and reach people in adjacent communities who would have come if anyone had told them.
An organization does excellent work and cannot explain it in writing. That is not a failure of intelligence, it is a specialized skill nobody on the team was hired for. We write it for them, and the resulting description tends to outlive whatever campaign it was written for.
We work most closely with Chicago Asian Network, a separate local organization that currently publishes community events and articles while our own platform is under development. Community submissions route through them, and we review them together.
Chicago Asian Network is a distinct organization from The AAPI Network. We describe the relationship explicitly because the two share history and a city, and we would rather state the distinction plainly than let anyone assume.
Off The Menu, our chef-hosted dinner series, also partners with beneficiary organizations on a per-event basis. Proceeds from the launch event support Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, a national 501(c)(3) that redistributes excess food from businesses to people experiencing food insecurity.
The AAPI Network is a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 33-2987062. Contributions fund services delivered to community organizations rather than the sale of those services. Our IRS determination letter and annual filings are available on request by writing to hello@aapinetwork.com.