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The Guild of the Royal Hospital of St Bartholomew – Cookies Notice

Last Reviewed 20/10/2025. A PDF version is available to view and download.

This Cookie Notice explains how The Guild of the Royal Hospital of St Bartholomew (registered charity number 251628) (“the Guild”) uses cookies and other tracking technologies through our website www.bartsguild.org.uk. We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected, and this website respects any consent you have given via our cookies banner which is displayed when you visit our website. This Cookies Notice is to be read alongside the Guild’s Privacy Notice – www.bartsguild.org.uk/privacy-notice – which explains how the Guild uses personal data. If you do not accept our use of cookies, please disable them following our guidance below.

1. What are web cookies?

Web cookies are small files that are placed on your computer or mobile device by a website when you visit it. They contain details of your browsing history on that website and distinguish you from other users. Cookies send data back to the originating website on each subsequent visit or allow another website to recognise the cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device and, for instance, remember your preferences and generally improve your online user experience. Like most websites, the Guild uses cookies.

Although this Notice refers to the general term “cookie”, which is the main method used by this website to store information, the browser’s local storage space is also used for the same purpose and cookies and we may use other tracking technologies through this website such as web beacons. As a result, the information included in this Cookie Notice is likewise applicable to all cookies and tracking technologies that we use.

You can find out more about cookies at https://allaboutcookies.org.

2. Why do we use cookies?

  1. To let you do things on our website – for example, cookies enable you to log in to secure areas of our website, use the online shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
  2. To collect anonymous statistics – the information collected by cookies enables us to improve the website through usage figures and patterns. For example, it is really useful to see which pages of the website – and therefore which of our services – are the most popular and how users are interacting them.
  3. To improve your experience of our website – for example, to prevent you having to re-enter details when you have already done so, or by ensuring that users can find what they are looking for easily.
  4. Measuring how cost-effective our advertising is – as a non-profit organisation, we need to watch our advertising spend carefully. Cookies are used to help us see how many people who click our adverts go on to do something further (for example, making a donation or applying to volunteer) and to help make advertising content more relevant to your interests.

3. Which types of cookies do we use?

The cookies that we use can have different characteristics. For example:

  • Session Cookies – Some of the cookies that we use are Session Cookies. These are deleted when you close your browser.
  • Persistent Cookies – These cookies stay on your browser or device until they expire or until you delete them from your browser history.

All cookies have an owner. You can identify the owner by looking at the domain. The domain is the company or website name in the cookie. Cookies can be first-party, which means that they’re owned by the website who set them. Alternatively, cookies can be third-party. This means they’re not owned by the website who set them.

We use both first-party and third-party cookies on our website.

4. What categories of cookies do we use?

Below is a list of the main cookies we use on this website.

  • Strictly Necessary Cookies – These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. These essential cookies are always enabled because our website won’t work properly without them. This means that we can’t switch them off. You can set your browser to block these cookies, but this will mean our website won’t work as well.
  • Analytics Cookies – These are cookies (also known as ‘performance cookies’) which allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They are non-essential cookies that help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site, so that we can improve the site. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our website, and will not be able to monitor its performance.
  • Marketing Cookies – These cookies may be set on our website by our advertising partners and used by us to measure our marketing activity. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store your contact details, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet enabled device.

Cookies List

The tables below set out the cookies and other tracking technologies we use and for what purposes.

 

STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES

COOKIE OWNER PURPOSE DURATION
Cookie Notice Accept The Guild Identifies whether the user has accepted the use of cookies on the website. Persistent (1 month).
cfduid and ARRAfinnity Social 9 These cookies are used to ensure trusted web traffic and to distribute traffic across different servers to ensure rapid response times and therefore improve the user experience of the website. Persistent (1 year) and session, respectively.
User identification The Guild These are used to identify and authenticate the user during website use and between sessions on the website, for example to automatically fill in forms. They also contain technical data of the user’s session, such as connection timeouts. Session – the cookie expires at the end of the session when you close your browser.

 

ANALYTICAL COOKIES

COOKIE OWNER PURPOSE DURATION
Statistics The Guild These cookies help monitor anonymous use of our website,
ie. which pages are visited.		 Persistent (up to 2 years) and session.
Google Analytics
(NID and Collect)		 Google This is a web analytics service which uses cookies to show us how visitors found and explored our website, and how we can enhance their experience. It provides us with information about the behaviour of our visitors (for example, how long they stayed on the site, or which services are particularly popular) and also tells us how many visitors we have had. For more information on Google Analytics, click here. Persistent (6 months) and session, respectively.

 

MARKETING COOKIES

COOKIE OWNER PURPOSE DURATION
Impression Bluesky Social;
Meta		 Used by Bluesky Social (Bluesky) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) to register impressions across websites, ie. when using the social media share buttons. Session – the cookie expires at the end of the session when you close your browser.

 

You can find more information about the cookies we use on following pages:

5. Website Cookie Acceptance

By clicking the ‘I Accept Cookies’ option when you first visited the website you consent to our use of cookies as updated from time to time. In particular, you consent to cookies being stored on your computer and/or mobile device (unless rejected or disabled by your browser). You also have the option to click ‘I Do Not Accept Cookies’ so that you reject all non-essential cookies. We also offer you the ability to customise your settings by providing your consent to some types of cookies and not others (you can do this on our cookie banner or by clicking the Cookie ‘C’ icon at the bottom of our website.

6. Turning cookies off

Internet browsers normally accept cookies by default. However, most browsers let you turn off either all or third-party cookies. What you are able to do depends on which browser you are using. If you do not accept our use of cookies as set out above, please do not click the ‘accept’ option when you visit our website and set your browser to reject cookies. However, please be aware that this may impair or limit your ability to use our website. The option to do this is usually found in the options, settings or preferences menu of your browser or mobile device.

Click on the links below to find out how to change your cookie settings in specific browsers and/or on particular operating systems:

There is also software available which enables you to use settings that allow you to choose which cookies are set on your digital device, such as the ‘Ghostery’ app.

7. Google Analytics

If you use Google’s Chrome browser, you can opt-out of sending data to Google Analytics by downloading and installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on.

8. Changes to this Notice

We keep this Notice under regular review and may update it from time to time, so we recommend that you check it regularly. Where necessary we may also notify you of changes by email. The Notice was last updated on 20/10/2025.

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