Shari Ruschmann
“There’s never a problem you can’t solve, never a mistake you can’t fix.”
After working for the same nonprofit for over 29 years, Shari Ruschmann accepted a position at the Phoenix Society of Burn Survivors in 2019, when the organization was right on the cusp of big changes. Shari was immediately thrown into the task of helping to evaluate a replacement for their old Razor’s Edge database. It turns out that was the easy part.
Shari had years of experience with Raiser's Edge products. However, the team at Phoenix Society all agreed that Salesforce could meet their needs and position the organization for growth better than Raiser’s Edge could. That’s when the real work began. A first attempt to build the Salesforce instance ended in frustration as the team struggled to map their data from Raiser's Edge to Salesforce. Their early path was full of dissatisfaction and failures.
Through it all, the team at Phoenix Society was still committed to their Salesforce migration, despite their initial trials. But it was by no means clear how that could be accomplished. That’s when the team first encountered Database Sherpa, and began to look at their conversion anew. The next attempt at creating the Salesforce instance was a group effort, but importing data would fall mostly to Shari.
During one fateful week, while the rest of the Phoenix Society team was away at an annual conference, Shari struggled on (with guidance from Ashima Saigal) to import data. Shari describes it as the most stressful week of her career due to the scope of the unfamiliar task. She quickly learned that “there's never a problem you can't solve, never a mistake you can't fix.” By the end of that week, the database began to resemble something the Phoenix Society could actually use. More importantly, Shari says, “I never felt like we weren't going to get there.”
Throughout the process, Shari stretched her limits and kept an attitude of "it will work out, even though it might not feel like it.” With encouragement and support, she developed skills to look at the big picture and confidence to try complicated new database tasks on her own, even in a new organization.
Shari carries her experience forward as a member of one of the Database Sherpa practice groups, and she continues to use her grace and good humor as she grows the Phoenix Society’s database. “There are definitely still failures because I'm still learning Salesforce. You're going to make mistakes. Know you're going to make some mistakes, but still try to do things and do it on your own. I haven't broken it yet to where it couldn't be fixed!"