ORCA is an evidence-informed tool for helping groups decide which interventions are the best fit for their communities.
What is ORCA? Optimizing Responses with Collaborative Assessments (ORCA) is a tool for helping groups efficiently, transparently, and carefully reach decisions about which interventions to implement in their community. It automatically combines each decision makers’ preferences— the factors they consider most important and influential on their decision — with each decision makers’ evaluation of the potential interventions. Decision makers can then view their individual and group results, which we call “intervention rankings,” to identify where they align and where they might need to better align before selecting an intervention or set of interventions that they feel good about and are excited to implement.
WHAT CAN ORCA
TELL YOU?
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ORCA can be customized to your group’s priorities and preferences.
ORCA’s Three Components
Criteria
Criteria are intervention characteristics that influence your decision to adopt an intervention.
Ratings
How well each intervention being considered meets criteria that users feel are important
Rankings
Your interventions rankings!
Steps to
Complete
ORCA
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ORCA’s Testing and Development
ORCA was first developed in 2018-2019 by talking to local decision makers about how they determine whether an intervention worth implementing. These decision makers included public health department directors, children’s advocacy organizations, state legislators, child and family serving-agency directors, and social service department directors. Their feedback was expanded with literature from Implementation Science on what factors matter for successfully implementing interventions.