Community Foster Care 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 category of cookies do we use?

  1. 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. In order to ensure our fundraising efforts and budgets are allocated to the best effect, we deem one performance cookie to be necessary (to remove this in your browser please see section below).

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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.

However, you can choose to use our website anonymously without giving us any information. Please see ‘How to disable cookies 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

  • 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.

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.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, you can use Google's opt-out tool.

How to disable cookies

If you wish to block Community Foster Care’s website cookies please follow the link to your browser of choice:

Find out more detailed information on disabling cookies here.