HSA 65th Anniversary Book

fy
10
FEBRUARY 1, 2009 –
JANUARY 31, 2010
PRESIDENT
Daniel
Lee
OFFICES
67 Mt. Auburn St.
17 Holyoke St.
52 JFK St.
Holyoke Center Arcade
The financial crisis hits HSA like
a ton of bricks
If the late 2000s were one long night, FY10 was its darkest
hour. The Great Recession forced many already-strained
agencies to immediately contract — or else go under.
Senior management went through every line of the HSA
budget, from building contracts to phone lines, with a
fine-toothed comb. The CCFE was among the hardest hit,
unable to rustle up its usual sponsorship contributions
from the floundering finance industry. (In 2007, Lehman
Brothers was one of the biggest sponsors of the Business
Leadership Program; in 2009, not so much.) HSA
Publications and Distribution also struggled as pennypinching
clients turned away from print advertising.
A day at the beach at the Maine home of
Vice President Heather Furman ’11.
Despite strong term-time laundry plans, HSA Cleaners was hit hard by Harvard’s decision to cut the
number of summer sessions from two to one, slashing the number of customers for lucrative laundry
and linen services. On the bright side, the agency gained a new website and, after ill-fatedly bringing the
freshman-linen program in house the previous year, found a new outsourcing partner that agreed to buy
up the existing inventory. After pursuing ventures that ultimately proved unfruitful, HSR focused on
rebuilding its websites and reining in costs. Overall, though, HSA’s cost-cutting could not keep up with
the plummet in revenue, and the corporation suffered its steepest net losses of the era. To add insult to
injury, HSA’s websites all mysteriously went
down in March, forcing HSA’s tech wizards
to overhaul the entire back-end architecture.
Oliver Koppell speaks at Let’s Go’s 50th-anniversary
celebration in January 2010.
won the i3 and took up residence on the fourth floor of Burke-McCoy Hall,
newly dubbed the Innovation Space; although it didn’t become an HSA
agency, it remains a thriving business today. Another i3 winner took flight
as Rover made its App Store debut with full Unofficial Guide content for the
iPhone and iPod. Its sights set on future development projects, Rover officially
gained agency status this year.
By far the biggest success of the year came from The Harvard Shop, which launched several partnerships that would form the
bedrock of the agency’s success for years to come. Chief among these was a partnership with Unofficial Tours, which agreed to
drop tourists off at the shop at the end of its popular “Hahvahd” tour — a blockbuster deal that attracted tens of thousands of
new customers per year. The Harvard Shop also reestablished an existing relationship with the Harvard Kennedy School while
launching a new one with the Graduate School of Education, for which The Harvard Shop became the official vendor. Sure, there
were setbacks — the website crash was particularly dire for The Harvard Shop’s web sales — but nothing could stop the Harvard
Shop juggernaut; Lukáš Toth cast his reparo spell and built a new site from the ground up in just a few days. Add it all up, and The
Harvard Shop officially became HSA’s largest agency in FY10. (Oh, and a full year of revenue from the Holyoke Center location
certainly didn’t hurt.)
The 2010 series marked the beginning of a new era at Let’s Go. In tandem with Avalon and TAN, Let’s Go rebranded itself —
this time voluntarily — as “the student travel guide” for the first time since the 1970s. After a 41-year hiatus, the hot-air balloon
soared once again to the top of the new, red-accented vintage covers. Thanks to the new publishers and the magical conjurings
of Alex Tremblay, full book content hit www.letsgo.com for the first time ever in June, joining RW blogs, videos, and a regular
e-newsletter. Another new partnership, with outside ad-sales agency Edman & Company, spelled the end of Let’s Go Ad Sales
after several years of bleeding advertisers and money.
HARVARD
STUDENT
AGENCIES
There were a few bright spots. Dorm Store
squeezed out some extra revenue with
Round 2 of the Harvard-Yale shuttles and by
absorbing Cheapside Foodery to create HSA
Market Day, a service to deliver preordered
food and snacks in bulk to Harvard houses.
Distribution signed a deal to deliver the
Harvard Crimson, and Her Campus, an online
magazine targeted at female college students,
Bittersweetly, a more efficient business model allowed Let’s Go to up its book
output while also downsizing its office staff, which welcomed the new positions
of Research Managers and Staff Writers (via Let’s Go’s first comp process!) to
the fold. As a result, the 29 employees and 37 RWs now frolicked exclusively
on the third floor. A flurry of book-making churned out 25 guides, the most
since 2005, including six new titles (although an epidemic of swine flu nixed
the proposed Let’s Go: Baja California). The Unofficial Guide, now once again
firmly in Let’s Go’s editorial clutches, was also reformatted to resemble a Let’s
Go city guide and expanded to Boston University.
Furman and managers Austin Chu ’10 and Priya Karve ’12 assist
excited prefrosh at HSA’s prefrosh-weekend open house.
LET’S GO TITLES
• Europe
• Great Britain
• France
• Italy
• Greece
• Israel
• Spain & Portugal
• New York City
AGENCIES
• Germany
• Paris
• Rome
• Central America
• Boston
• Western Europe
• Barcelona
• Costa Rica
• Thailand
• Roadtripping USA
• Buenos Aires
• Berlin, Prague & Budapest
• Costa Rica, Nicaragua
& Panama
• Florence
• Guatemala & Belize
• London, Oxford,
Cambridge & Edinburgh
• Yucatán Peninsula
OTHER TITLES
• The Unofficial Guide to Life
at Harvard
• The Unofficial Guide to
Prefrosh Weekend
• The Harvard Guide to
Summer Opportunities
• The Unofficial Guide to Life
in Boston
• The Unofficial Guide to Life
at Boston University
• HSA Cleaners
• Let’s Go Publications
• Harvard Student Resources
• Harvard Distribution
Services
• HSA Publications
• Cronin Center
for Enterprise
• The Harvard Shop
• HSA Dorm Store
• Rover
92 HSA 65th Anniversary History Book 93