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 as they allow us to monitor use of our website so that we can continually improve it and optimise our supporters’ experience. Most Cookies cannot identify you as an individual, they recognise your IP address.  You can find general information about cookies at All About Cookies and Your Choices Online.

How do we use Cookies?

We use cookies to track how visitors come to our website, and how they interact with it. 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. 

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 

Other cookies are designed to optimise visitors experience using the website, for example, ensuring a smooth donation process.

Selecting Cookie Preferences

To help you know what cookies we are using and to provide the ability to select those to opt in or out of, we use a consent management platform (CMP), called OneTrust. When you first visit our website it will display, but you can always reopen it whenever you are on our site, by clicking on the cookie icon in the bottom left corner of any page of the website, to ‘manage your preferences’. The CMP will also display if you have previously visited our website but have deleted your browser history since that visit. All our ookies are listed in the CMP, along with a description of what they are used for. We bucket the cookies into the following types and categories. 

Types of Cookies

Cookies fall into two broad types:

First party cookies: these are the DEC’s own cookies, that are served directly by our website to your computer and are used, for example, to recognise your computer when it revisits our website and to remember your preferences as you browse the site. 

Third party cookies: these are installed by parties other than the DEC. We use third party cookies mainly 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.

Categories of Cookies 

Strictly 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. We are unable to offer you the option to opt-out from these cookies due to their essential nature.

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. These cookies are 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 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 THIRD-PARTY COOKIES?

The DEC uses several third-party cookies to support how we communicate with people online and to help us understand how our digital activity performs. These cookies are set by external providers and are mainly used for marketing, analytics and media purposes.

Our third-party cookies are mainly for Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Bing, YouTube, Quantcast, Podscribe, TikTok, Spotify, and Google.

Where you have given consent for marketing cookies, these third-party cookies may be placed on your device to collect information about your online behaviour. This information is used to measure the effectiveness of our digital advertising and campaigns, and to help ensure our messages are relevant. Data may be shared directly with these third-party platforms or first processed by the DEC before being shared in an aggregated or anonymised form.

You can opt out of these cookies on the DEC website through the consent management platform OneTrust (the cookie icon in the bottom left-hand corner). To opt out of being tracked by third-parties you can use their consent options, for example for Google Analytics across all websites, you can use Google's opt-out tool. You can also adjust your ad preferences in Meta by visiting this guide ‘Your ad preferences and how you can adjust them on Facebook | Facebook Help Centre’.

Website statistics analytics, testing, and personalisation

We use the following website analytics services to understand how visitors use our website, so we can improve how it works and the content we provide.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google. Google Analytics uses first party 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 first party cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behaviour 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. This data will be transmitted to and stored by Hotjar on Amazon Web Services infrastructure services hosted in Ireland.

 

Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to use any of our data for its own purposes.

Meta

We use the Meta Pixel to monitor the performance of our advertising on Facebook and Instagram. The Meta Pixel uses first-party cookies to automatically save a unique identifier for the website domain on your device if one does not already exist.  If you click on an ad on Facebook, the Meta Pixel may also record that action and link it to your device.  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.

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 icon at the bottom left corner of the site (it is a C shape, or artist’s paint palette). You can then adjust the available sliders to ‘On’ or ‘Off’, then clicking the  ‘X’ at the top right of the preferences box to exit. You may need to refresh your page for your settings to take effect.

Alternatively, most web browsers (such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) 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 the respective browser website or www.allaboutcookies.org.

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: 020 7387 0200
  • Email: support@dec.org.uk
  • Post: Data Protection Officer, 17-21 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GT

You may also wish to review our full Privacy Policy.

Last reviewed: March 2026