Sample Interview Questions and Answers: What Are Your Strengths? Leonard’s Answer

(Who is  Leonard? Leonard – Non-Profit Leader with 25 years experience seeking Executive Director role)

Terry: What do you see as your strengths?

Leonard: I think my strengths are the ability to relate to diverse groups of people.  Whether we’re talking about the school, teachers, principals or whether we’re talking about community members or young people and their families, staff or board members, the ability to relate to them and to listen to what they’re talking about and try to connect with them.

I view building programs as a partnership with all those kinds of people, all those different diverse groups and stakeholders.

The second strength is my ability to network with and nurture current and potential funders.

Terry: Tell me more about that.

Leonard: Wherever I’ve worked, I have grown the diversity of the funding mechanisms.  For instance, at the XXX when I became the Executive Director they had one major funder or foundation.

I led the board and the organization into a plan to reach out to other foundations.  We diversified it, both in terms of private foundations as well as state grants, built an individual donor campaign and then built a sponsor’s campaign

I led them from an annual meeting that lost money in the first year before I came to an annual meeting that made money for the organization by charging a fee for the meeting as well as recruiting sponsors and exhibitors for that annual meeting.  It’s really reaching out and looking for diverse streams of money.

Terry: Can you give me a sense of what the before and after was in terms of the foundation or funding support that you got as a result of the efforts that you were just talking about?

Leonard: Yes.  The grant that I came in on was roughly $XXX a year for three years.  I renewed that grant for an additional three years and built two other sizable grants.  We got a $XXX grant for two projects. We also received numerous operating grants in the range of $XXX to $XXX, so the budget went from $XXX to $XXX, plus corporate sponsors that ranged anywhere from $250 up to $10,000.

Then, as I was getting ready to leave we were launching an individual donor’s campaign and in the first year we had about 125 individual donors with contributions ranging anywhere from $10 to $1,000.

Here’s how I would rate this answer . . .

Q4. What are your strengths? – LENNY QUICK RATING – C

Because I had to push in a followup to get the great stuff that is an A rating, don’t make them ask you, provide more of the impressive metrics up front in your answer.