DEC Cookie Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie.

Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device and to target the content displayed to the user’s interests. You can find more information about cookies at All About Cookies and Your Choices Online.

Types of cookie

There are two broad types of cookies:

  1. First party cookies: these are cookies that are served directly by the website operator to your computer and are often used to recognise your computer when it revisits that site and to remember your preferences as you browse the site. Basically, these are our cookies.
  2. 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.

Some cookies are essential for the effective functioning of the website. We are unable to offer you the option to opt-out from these cookies due to this essential nature.

What categories of cookies do we use?

  • Necessary Cookies: these cookies are essential to provide you with the website and its services. Without these cookies, services such as transactional pages and secure login accounts 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 a font size, or customisable parts of a web page.
  • 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. We also use performance cookies to ensure our budgets are positioned effectively and ensure the best fundraising returns on our investment. 
  • Marketing Cookies: these cookies collect information about the users' browsing habits. This also includes your use of social media sites, e.g. Facebook, etc. or how you interact with our website. These may also be used to choose the advertisements that are displayed to you on other websites or help us understand the effectiveness of our campaigns. 

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.

However, you can choose to use our website anonymously without giving us any information. Please see ‘Changing your cookie preferences’ below.

If you visit our website, we may use cookies to record information about:

  • the areas of the website you visit 
  • the amount of time you spend on the site 
  • whether you are new to the site, or have visited it before 
  • the country, region, city and/or borough associated with your IP address or device 
  • how you came to our website – for example, through an email link or a search engine 
  • the type of device and browser you use 
  • how you use the website and the quality of your experience – for example we may track your bandwidth when viewing videos 
  • how you interact with our donation and sign up forms – for example what you select as your communication preferences 
  • how you interact with our campaigns and digital marketing 
  • any error messages that you receive on the site 

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.

HOW ARE COOKIES COLLECTED AND PROCESSED?

The DEC currently uses two methods to collect and process third-party cookies. In the DEC’s case, the relevant third parties are Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google.

We use client-side tracking to collect and process marketing tags and cookies which are then sent directly to Meta and Google. In this instance, if you opt in to marketing cookies, third party cookies will be placed on your device. These cookies will learn things about your behaviour online, and send information straight to Meta and Google.

We also use server-side tracking to collect and process marketing tags and cookies. In this instance, third party cookies will still be placed on your device if you opt in to marketing cookies, but we will intercept the information before it gets to Meta or Google, and can control what information they receive. We use server side tagging because we think it is more secure and because it is a valuable tool that enables us to understand the effectiveness of our digital advertising and campaigns. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, you can use Google's opt-out tool. You can adjust your ad preferences in Meta by visiting this guide.

Website statistics analytics, testing, and personalisation

In order to improve our services to provide you with relevant content, and to analyse how visitors use our website, we use the following website analytics services.  

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google. Google Analytics uses cookies, which (as discussed above) are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about aggregated use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States.

Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage.

Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf.

Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

HotJar

Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device's IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form),

device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website.

Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.

For further details, please see the ‘about Hotjar’ section of Hotjar’s support site.

Meta

We use the Meta Pixel to monitor the performance of our advertising on Facebook and Instagram. When the Meta Pixel is installed on a website, and the Pixel uses first-party cookies, the Pixel automatically saves a unique identifier to a cookie for the website domain on your device if one does not already exist. If you click on an ad on Facebook, the link sometimes includes a technical identifier to that link to identify that it was clicked on a Facebook page. When you land on the target website, if the website has a Meta Pixel that uses first-party cookies, the Pixel automatically saves the technical identifier as a cookie for that website domain. This is done to understand and monitor an individual’s engagement with ads and links in Meta and the journey individuals take when they engage with them.

See About Cookie Settings For Your Meta Pixel for information on first-party cookie settings.

CHANGES TO THIS COOKIE POLICY

We will occasionally update this Cookie Policy to reflect changes in our practices and services. We aim to scan the website every 3 months to ensure the cookie preference manager is up to date. We recommend that you check this page from time to time to inform yourself of any changes in this Cookie Policy or any of our other policies.

Cookies that have been set in the past

If you have disabled one or more Cookies, we may still use information collected from cookies prior to your disabled preference being set, however, we will stop using the disabled cookie to collect any further information.

How to disable cookies or change your preferences

You can change your cookie preferences at any time by clicking on the ‘C’ icon at the bottom left corner of the site. You can then adjust the available sliders to ‘On’ or ‘Off’, then clicking the ‘C’ icon or ‘X’ to exit. You may need to refresh your page for your settings to take effect.

Alternatively, most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

Find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:

To find information relating to other browsers, visit the browser developer's website.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions or comments about this Cookie Policy, or privacy matters generally, please contact us via email, telephone or post:

  • Telephone: 02073870200
  • Email: support@dec.org.uk
  • Post: Data Protection Officer, 17-21 Wenlock Road, London, N1

You may also wish to review our full Privacy Policy.

Last reviewed: 08 / 12 /2023