Cookies
Last updated: 9 Dec 2020
What’s a cookie?
A cookie is a tiny file that stores a fragment of information on your computer/mobile. Cookies are used on almost all websites.
When you visit a website, that website is able to store cookies on your device for future reference. When you return to the website, the information stored in those files can be accessed by the website.
We use a number of cookies on this website. They can be categorised in the following way:
Strictly necessary cookies
We use these cookies to make the website function. They are vital to the website working properly.
Functional cookies
These cookies make the website better for you. They store things such as whether you like subtitles being on or off when watching a video. If they are turned off, the website will still function. However, the website won’t work as well as it did.
Performance cookies
We use these cookies to improve the website. For example, they help us to learn which pages are popular, and which are unpopular. We can use that insight to make the website more interesting or useful for visitors like you.
More details about the cookies in these categories can be found further down this page.
How to control cookies
You can control which cookies are saved on your computer/mobile. Please be aware, making changes to essential cookies may stop the website functioning correctly.
One way to change the cookies in use is to use the cookie control installed on the website. It can be opened by selecting this graphic which is on the bottom-right corner of every page:
Another way to control cookies is by changing the settings of the browser (e.g. Chrome) that you’re using. You can find more information about this on the All About Cookies website.
Cookies set by other websites
Sometimes we embed a feature from another website. An example of this would be adding a YouTube video to a page.
We do this to make the most of the funds our supporters give us. It’s expensive to host videos for playing on websites. If we use YouTube or Vimeo we can save the money of our supporters.
Embedded features sometimes store cookies on your computer/mobile phone. We have less control over these cookies – as they are saved in a different location on your device. They are called ‘third party cookies’.
More about strictly necessary cookies
We employ the following cookies to help the website function. These cookies remember your preference for subtitles on videos, they let you pause and restart podcasts, they even remember your cookie settings!
These are the cookies that fall into this category:
CookieControl
This stores the preferences you set with regard to cookies so they can be followed in future.
Type: first-party cookie
Lasts for: three months
JSESSIONID
This cookie is stored when you download a resource. It is used to connect together the pages you visit so the website functions correctly.
Please note that this is set by a separate website because resources are stored on the Oxfam Digital Repository.
Type: first-party cookie
Lasts for: the length of your visit
More about functional cookies
These cookies are used to support website features that help visitors.
At the time of writing (see the date at the top of this page) no cookies that fall into this category are set by the website.
In future, this may change as we make changes to the website. If that happens we will update this page to detail the cookies concerned.
More about performance cookies
Cookies related to Google Analytics
Imagine if a business didn’t know how many customers it had. How would it know if it was serving its customers well?
This is where analytics cookies are so useful. They help us to understand what people like you think of the website. They help us to see which pages no one visits, and which pages are a roaring success. We use Google Analytics for this purpose.
_ga
Used to tell users apart by Google Analytics. Note this doesn’t identify individuals. Rather it is used to report that 30 people visited a web page yesterday rather than 3 or 300.
Type: first-party
Lasts for: 2 years
_gid
This is another cookie that is used by Google Analytics to calculate individuals who are visiting on of our web pages.
Type: first-party
Lasts for: 24 hours
_gat_UA-3952532-10
This cookie is used by Google Analytics to throttle requests to the service.
Type: first-party
Lasts for: 1 minute!
Learn more about Google Analytics cookies from the Google Developers website.
Cookies related to Google Optimize
We sometimes experiment with features on this website. For example, we might test to see if having less text on our resource pages makes them easier to use for visitors.
We use Google Optimize to run these tests and assess the results. These are the cookies stores by the service:
_gaexp
This cookie is used to store if a user is included in an Google Optimize experiment.
Type: first-party
Last for: varies. This cookies lasts as long as we run an experiment. The likely range of this is between 2 weeks and 6 months.
Learn more about Google Optimize cookies from the Google Developers website.
More about cookies
You can learn more about cookies at the All About Cookies website.
If you have questions about the way we use cookies on this website do contact us.