Helpful documents for story collectors
Before you start, please find some helpful documents. Click on the pink buttons below to download:
- Telling your story: everything you need to know document: You can copy and paste our pre-prepared introductory text into texts or emails to help you recruit potential storytellers. Please use and amend this text to what feels most comfortable to you.
- Consent form for storytellers: Share this with storytellers and they must fill this out and return to your assigned McPin contact (either Emma – [email protected], or Eva – [email protected])
- Story prompts: These prompts aim to spark ideas and help storytellers consider their mental health in relation to social media
- Reflection space: Use this page to reflect on the process and stories you collect. Fill this in as you go. You can use your reflections for our online YPAG reflection meeting in February 2026.
Story examples
Your role as a story collector allows you to empower other young people to tell their stories about their experiences of mental health, social media and influencer content. These stories will be published on a website and shared on social media. They will begin conversations with influencers, policy makers, young people, and more.
There are many ways to tell a story. We’d love our story collectors to encourage the storytellers to be creative. Storytellers can also choose how much they want to share of their own identity in these formats, e.g. whether or not they want their own voice, image or name to be used.
For some inspiration and to help you guide the storytellers we have created some examples of the sorts of stories you could collect.
Video stories
Storytellers can share their thoughts via a video. This could be a recording of them speaking, singing or rapping. They might want to create a cartoon or speak over an image or move images.
Written stories
Storytellers can share their story in writing. This could be a poem, a journal entry, a poem or quote. These written stories can be handwritten, illustrated and decorated, they don’t have to be typed.
Artwork-based stories
Maybe your storyteller would like to create a drawing, painting or graphic. Have fun with arts and crafts, make a collage and get creative. Your storytellers will need to take a high quality, well-lit photo of their work and send it to their named McPin contact, rather than sending us the original artwork.
