What is a cookie and why do we use them?
Cookies are small text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. These cookies are then sent back to the website on each time visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie.
Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user and remember their preferences, in some cases allowing the sites to tailor the content displayed to the user’s to match interests.
You can find more information about cookies on the ICO website.
Types of cookies
There are two broad types of cookies:
- First party cookies: these are cookies that are served directly by the website you are visiting to your computer and are often used to recognise the user when they revisit that site and to remember their preferences as you browse the site. Basically, these are our cookies.
- Third party cookies: these are installed by parties other than the owner of the website a user visits. We use third party cookies for functionality, performance/analytics, advertising and social media purposes.
In addition, cookies may be either ‘session cookies’ or ‘persistent cookies’. Your computer automatically removes session cookies once you close your browser. Persistent cookies will survive on your computer until an expiry date, specified in the cookie itself, is reached. We use both session and persistent cookies.
Wherever it is practical to do so, we use anonymous cookies. These are cookies that allow us to understand how you use our website but without capturing any information that could be used to identify you – all we can tell is that ‘someone’ visited our site and visited a certain page (or pages). This is vital in helping us improve unpopular content, promote popular content and produce more of the content you like.
Where a cookie does capture information, such as an IP address, that can identify you; and where the cookie is not essential for you to be able to use our website, we ask for your consent before placing the cookie on your device.
Some cookies are essential for the effective functioning of the website. We are unable you to offer you the option to opt-out from these cookies due to this essential nature.
What categories of cookies do we use?
Essential Website Cookies: these cookies are essential to provide you with the website and its services. Without these cookies, services such as donation pages or secure shop purchases would not be possible.
Functionality Cookies: these cookies remember choices made by or attributes of the user and enhance the features and content you experience during your visit to our website, e.g. language, appeals visited or user’s location. This cookie is also used to remember a user’s preferences for font size or customisable parts of a web page.
Analytics and Performance Cookies: we use performance/analytics cookies to analyse how the website is accessed, used or is performing in order to provide you with a better user experience and to maintain, operate and continually improve the website. These cookies do not collect information that identifies the user.
Advertising and Tracking Cookies: these cookies collect information about the users’ browsing habits. This may also include your use of social media sites, e.g. Facebook, or how you interact with our website which then shows you relevant content elsewhere on the internet. Please note, these may also be used to choose the advertisements that are displayed to you on our website and other websites.
Social Media Cookies: on some pages of our website, third parties that provide applications through our website may set their own cookies in order to track the success of their applications or customise applications for you. Some pages of our website may also contain embedded content.
How do we use cookies?
We may collect some, or all, of the information available from cookies when you visit our website, depending on how you use it. We monitor how people use our website so we can improve it. We collect this information anonymously.
We use cookies to track how visitors come to our site. For example, we use marketing or referring tracking codes in internet addresses (URLs) to show us whether a visitor has come to our site via a link on a referring website or in a specific piece of marketing and to give us insight into the effectiveness of our marketing.
Although not through cookies, we do measure the success of the emails we send so that we know what subject lines and stories people liked the most. We receive this information anonymously; we do not and will never share this information.
Changes to this cookies policy
From time to time we may need to update our cookies policy to reflect changes in our practices and services. We recommend that you check this page to inform yourself of any changes.
Contact us
If you have any questions or comments about this cookies policy or any other enquiry please contact our web team – we are always happy to hear what you think.