One of the challenging things about running an Agora is reaching all of the people who might be interested in attending. You have social media as one option, but that is noisy and there's no guarantee your desired audience (say, people who previously attended an event) will ever see it.
This is where MailChimp comes in, as it allows you to create and manage large email lists of up to thousands of people without the hassle of keeping track of them in G Suite or only using Eventbrite (both of which are alternatives). You can still send out mass emails using Gmail, and you can let previous attendees know about your upcoming event by using Eventbrite, but if you want to start your own newsletter connecting people with each other or other events, then MailChimp is best.
NOTE: We are currently experimenting with how to make MailChimp easily integrated for all Agoras. Right now, several are using it on their own and we think that we can make this part of the standard suite of apps without you having to do anything... but we're not sure yet.
MailChimp is an email marketing platform that DEF uses to send out our monthly newsletter, The Dispatch, and also happens to synch with Eventbrite and NeonCRM, which track event attendees and members of the DEF community.
Although there are challenges that come with email marketing tools (namely questions surrounding how much content to push and on what frequency), it is one of the few guaranteed ways to make sure that people interested in what DEF is doing are kept informed (vice social media, whose algorithms change on such a routine basis that doing so is very challenging).