Legal

Survey Terms of Use

The Infant Feeding Index Survey located at survey.infantfeedingindex.com

Effective date: 23rd June 2026 Last updated: 23rd June 2026

Welcome

The Infant Feeding Index ("the Index") is a living, real-world dataset of how mothers around the world experience pregnancy, birth and infant feeding. Built from your responses and those of mothers like you, it exists to make the systemic gaps in maternal care visible - to governments, hospitals, insurers, researchers and the public - so that the next generation of mothers is supported better than the last.

These Terms of Use explain what you are agreeing to when you complete the survey at survey.infantfeedingindex.com (also reachable via the technical alias survey.thethompsonmethod.com). Please read them carefully. By starting the survey, you are confirming you understand and accept these terms and our Survey Privacy Policy.

The Index is operated by the Trustee for 4 Good Unit Trust (ABN 85 145 868 031) trading as The Thompson Method ("we", "us", "our"), based in Queensland, Australia. We can be reached at hello@infantfeedingindex.com.

If you came here from infantfeedingindex.com and end up back there after submitting (on the thank-you page), please note that the landing page and thank-you page are governed by a separate Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

1. What the Index is - and what it isn't

The Index is a real-world evidence (RWE) collection initiative. It gathers anonymous responses from mothers worldwide and turns them into a continuously updated public-good dataset of infant feeding outcomes. Two of the metrics the Index is built around - the Intention-Gap™ and the Robyn Factor™ - measure the distance between the feeding experience mothers planned for and the one they actually received.

The Index is not:

a clinical trial or academic research study requiring institutional ethics committee (HREC/IRB) approval;
a medical service, diagnostic tool, or provider of personalised health advice;
a substitute for the care of your doctor, midwife, child health nurse, lactation consultant or other qualified health professional.

We are honest about this distinction because informed consent requires it. The Index has the rigour and discipline of a research project, but it is structured as consumer-contributed real-world data rather than as formal academic research. If you have concerns about your own health or your baby's health, please speak with your healthcare provider - and if you are facing an emergency, contact your local emergency services immediately.

2. Who can participate

To take part in the Index, you must:

be at least 18 years old;
be a woman who has given birth to at least one live baby; and
be reflecting on one specific pregnancy, birth, and infant feeding experience (the same baby across the whole survey).

You can participate from anywhere in the world. There is no cap on how old your child is now - whether you gave birth six months ago or sixteen years ago, your experience matters to the Index. If you have more than one child, please choose one to focus on for this survey. You are welcome to return at a future date to share a separate experience if we open additional rounds.

3. The survey

The survey takes most participants about 15–20 minutes to complete. It's a reflective instrument of around 100 questions, though skip logic means you'll see fewer depending on your responses, covering your pregnancy, your birth, the feeding journey you hoped for, the feeding journey you actually had, and the support - or absence of support - you received along the way.

The survey is anonymous. We do not ask for your name, your email, your address, or any other identifier. We do not capture or store your IP address while you complete the survey. The only things we know about you are the country and state you tell us in the survey, and whatever else you choose to share in your responses. Please don't enter your full name, your child's full name, addresses, phone numbers, or other identifying details into free-text fields.

Some of the questions touch on areas that can be emotionally heavy: difficulty feeding, lack of support, mental health, and loss. You can pause at any time, skip any question that doesn't apply, or stop entirely without submitting. Nothing you have entered is added to the Index until you press Submit.

If at any point you feel distressed, please consider reaching out to a support service in your country. Some starting points:

Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14 · Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 · PANDA 1300 726 306
United Kingdom: Samaritans 116 123
United States: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988)
Canada: Talk Suicide Canada 1-833-456-4566

In any country, if you are in immediate danger please contact your local emergency services.

4. Participation is voluntary

Participation is entirely voluntary. You are free to decline, withdraw, or skip any question, and there is no consequence for doing so - you keep full access to any other The Thompson Method or My Milk Map services you use.

There is no payment or compensation for taking part. The Index is supported by participants who choose to contribute their experience to a shared resource. We are grateful for every response.

5. Your consent for data use

By starting the survey and pressing Submit at the end, you are giving us permission to:

Collect your anonymous survey responses - without any identifier, name, email, IP address, or other personal data linking the responses to you;
Add your responses to the Index dataset for use in the ways described in Section 6; and
Publish aggregated, statistical findings from the Index - for example, the proportion of mothers in a given country whose feeding intentions were met, or systemic patterns affecting a particular group of mothers.

About the email opt-in after the survey: after you submit, you will be redirected to a thank-you page on infantfeedingindex.com. That page offers an optional email opt-in if you'd like to receive Index findings and Thompson Method updates. That opt-in is a separate consent on a separate site, governed by a separate Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. The email you give us there is stored in a system entirely disconnected from your survey responses - there is no join key, no shared timestamp linkage, and no technical pathway between the two. We cannot match your email to the survey you just submitted, and neither can anyone else.

6. How Index data is used - and what we will never do

What we will do with anonymous, aggregated Index data

We may share, license, or publish aggregated Index findings with:

governments and public health agencies - to inform policy, services and funding;
hospitals and health systems - to improve maternal care and feeding outcomes;
academic researchers - to support published work on maternal and infant health;
private health insurers - to inform coverage, prevention and member-support programs; and
the general public - through reports, articles and dashboards.

Where the Index is licensed commercially (for example, to a health insurer), the proceeds support the ongoing work of The Thompson Method and our mission to reach mothers who cannot otherwise afford support.

What we will never do

We will never sell, license or share Index data with pharmaceutical companies, infant formula manufacturers, or any commercial entity whose products or interests could conflict with the wellbeing of mothers and infants in the dataset.
We will never use Index responses to train third-party AI models.
We will never publish data in a way that ranks, judges, or compares individual mothers against each other. Where we segment the data - for example, by feeding method or country - we do so to surface the systemic issues each group faces (such as the supply-chain failures faced by formula-feeding mothers, or the hospital-system failures faced by breastfeeding mothers). The system is the subject of scrutiny; mothers are not.
We will never publish anything that could identify you or your baby personally - and we have deliberately built the Index so that we are not capable of doing so.

7. How long we keep your data

Your survey responses are anonymous from the moment of collection. We collect no name, no email, no IP address, and no other identifier alongside them. Individual response records are retained for three years from submission, after which they are deleted. The aggregated, statistical findings derived from them - the Index dataset itself - are kept indefinitely as a public-good resource.

There is no way to withdraw a survey response after submission, because there is nothing to withdraw it from. We never know who you are. There is no email, account, reference number, or other identifier we could use to find your responses among the thousands of others. This is intentional: the absence of any link is the privacy mechanism. We tell you this honestly so that you can make a fully informed choice before submitting. Once you press Submit, your contribution is in.

Before submitting, you can stop at any time - simply close your browser. Nothing you have entered is kept unless you press Submit.

8. Your responsibilities as a participant

By participating, you confirm that:

the information you provide is truthful and your own - please don't submit responses on behalf of someone else;
you are participating once per pregnancy/baby you are reflecting on;
you are not a competitor, journalist, researcher or commercial entity attempting to extract our methodology or seed the dataset with manufactured responses; and
you will not attempt to disrupt, scrape, reverse-engineer or interfere with the survey, the Index or the website.

We may exclude responses we reasonably believe are not genuine.

9. The Index, our intellectual property, and your contribution

Your responses, though anonymous, are voluntarily contributed by you. You are not transferring ownership of your story to us by participating. The licence you grant us by pressing Submit is the permission described in Section 5 - to add your responses to the Index dataset, aggregate them with those of other mothers, and publish the resulting statistical findings in the ways described in these terms and the Privacy Policy.

The Index itself - including its design, methodology, metrics (such as the Intention-Gap™ and Robyn Factor™), reports, dashboards, software and brand - is owned by us and protected by intellectual property laws. You may read, share and quote from publicly released Index materials for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Any commercial use, reproduction of the methodology, or use of our trade marks requires our prior written permission.

Names including The Infant Feeding Index, Intention-Gap, Robyn Factor, The Thompson Method, My Milk Map and associated logos are trade marks of the Trustee for 4 Good Unit Trust.

10. Disclaimers

The Index is provided "as is". While we apply care in how the survey is designed, how data is collected, and how findings are produced, we make no guarantees that any specific finding will apply to your individual circumstances, and the Index is not personalised advice to you. Any reliance you place on Index content is at your own discretion. Nothing in these terms excludes any consumer or statutory right you have under the laws of your country that cannot lawfully be excluded - including, for Australian participants, the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law.

11. No warranties; your statutory rights

The Index is provided in good faith for educational and research purposes. We make no warranties about findings, recommendations, or the experience of participating. Nothing in these terms affects any rights you have under privacy law, consumer law or other legislation in your country that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Stopping participation, changes, and termination

You can stop participating at any time before submission - simply close the survey. After submission, the position is as set out in Section 7: because the survey is anonymous, individual responses cannot be located or withdrawn.

We may change, suspend or discontinue the Index, the survey, or this website at any time. Where we make a material change to these terms or to how data is used, we will publish the updated version at this page. Because survey responses are anonymous and we cannot reach respondents directly, material changes to how Index data is used apply only to responses submitted after the change takes effect, never retrospectively to data already in the dataset.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia, and you and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland. If you participate from outside Australia, you may also have rights and remedies under the laws of your country, which these terms do not override.

14. Questions, concerns and complaints

For anything to do with these terms, your participation, or Index findings, please contact us:

Email: hello@infantfeedingindex.com Privacy matters: privacy@infantfeedingindex.com Post: PO Box 13, Rainbow Beach QLD 4581, Australia

If you are not satisfied with our response to a privacy concern, you can also contact the privacy regulator in your country. For Australian participants this is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (www.oaic.gov.au).

Thank you for contributing your experience to the Index. Every response makes the picture more honest, and the case for change more impossible to ignore.