Quids in! hears from Tom Tapper, founder of the purpose-driven creative agency Nice and Serious, on why the stories we tell matter more than ever.

On 5th March, Quids in! will be staging Changing the Conversation. It is a webinar about re-engaging communities who feel left behind and left in the dark. It is a call to service providers across the public and third sectors to rethink not just what they deliver, but how they speak, who they centre, and the assumptions that shape their work.

Last month, Quids in! reflected on how principles of equity are essential to engaging disaffected communities – but how, applied clumsily, they can alienate the very people they are meant to include. 

What stories have we been telling about how hard life is for people? What did those stories once achieve and where do they now fall short? Whose stories are cutting through instead?

In our upcoming webinar, speakers will explore how social movements have transformed public discourse, yet often failed to reach “kitchen table conversations”; how stigma operates in the everyday lives of people in hardship; and how organisations like Quids in! have tried to embed lived experience throughout their work. Opening this conversation, Quids in! spoke to one of our speakers Tom Tapper, founder of the communications agency Nice and Serious, about narrative, authenticity and why now is the moment to shift course.

Beyond statistics and scientific language

Tom founded Nice and Serious in 2008 because he felt something wasn’t landing. “I believed organisations had become overly reliant on stats and scientific language to convince audiences to take action,” he explains. Instead, he wanted to help organisations tell “more grounded, human stories – ones that tap into emotions to drive people to act.”

This observation resonates far beyond environmental campaigning. In the public and third sectors, statistics have become a kind of institutional comfort blanket. All of this matters. They satisfy funders and reassure policy-makers, but numbers rarely move people on their own.

When hardship is described primarily in percentages and policy terminology, something essential gets lost: The human texture of lived experience. The anxiety of unopened letters. The calculation at the supermarket till. The pride swallowed when asking for help.Data can demonstrate scale. Stories convey reality. Like a dot-to-dot puzzle, the numbers alone don’t paint the picture.

If we want to re-engage people who feel talked about rather than listened to, perhaps the first shift is from abstract need to a shared humanity.

Making the complex practical

Tom points to Nice and Serious’s recent work with Fairtrade as an example of how narrative can bring a systemic issue back to earth. The campaign platform, Do It Fair, was designed to make fairness in global trade easier to understand and act on.

“I like how it takes a complex, systemic issue and brings it back to something practical and simple – connecting everyday choices with the realities producers face, in clear, plain language,” he says.

The results? Increased awareness and understanding, and more people actively choosing Fairtrade products .

There is a lesson here for policymakers and service providers. Too often, the systems that shape people’s lives, like welfare, housing, energy prices, and debt, are communicated in ways that reinforce their complexity. We need to help demystify these things. If we want engagement, we must connect policy to lived reality in plain, accessible ways.

Clarity is not oversimplifying. It is an act of respect. Anyone who has seen Quids in! magazine will know this is core to our approach.

Stop assuming. Start listening.

Perhaps the most striking part of Tom’s response came when we asked where government should start if designing a campaign for struggling households.

“Honestly, I don’t know!” he says. “As is often the case, I don’t represent the audience, so I’d be making a lot of assumptions.”

Rather than presuming expertise, Nice and Serious convenes what they call ‘Creative Councils’. These are small groups of people who represent the target audience. They are paid for their time and consulted throughout the process, from early insight gathering to message testing and final campaign development . Crucially, they also explore how people actually access information, including whether digital-first approaches are appropriate, who is trusted, and which channels resonate.

“Too often organisations don’t spend enough time getting to know their audience on a personal level. There’s only so much inspiration you can get from a survey.”

This speaks directly to the challenge facing institutions today. Many strategies are built on data sets and segmentation models, but less frequently on deep, relational insight. We risk designing communications for imagined audiences rather than real people.

The message and the messenger

Stories are not only about what is said, but who says it, reflects Tom: “I think we often get the message and messenger wrong. There’s a tendency to default to picking an expert spokesperson to carry the message. But with the best will in the world, they often come across as detached from reality.”

“Most of us will respond better to a message that comes from someone who we have affinity with, someone we can relate to… someone who has gone through financial hardship themselves. Quite simply the advice given comes with authenticity, not perceived judgement.”

This is not an argument against expertise. It is an argument for expanding who counts as an expert.

For too long, institutional communications have elevated credentials over credibility, which is often forged through lived experience. When advice feels grounded in real life rather than abstract principle, it is more likely to be heard and acted upon.

If we want to close the gap between institutions and people experiencing hardship, Tom suggests we must “widen and diversify the pool of messengers”. Participation follows recognition. When people see themselves reflected in those delivering the message, engagement feels safer and more possible.

Why now?

“If there ever was a time to change the conversation, it’s now,” Tom says. “The same old tactics don’t seem to be working, and going silent will only see us sliding backwards. We desperately need new narratives that communicate progressive ideas with some populist panache.”

Across the UK, trust in institutions is fragile at best. Many households are navigating financial precarity, rising costs and complex systems that feel indifferent. In that environment, communication cannot be an afterthought. It is part of the service itself.

Where did we go wrong? Perhaps we did not so much go wrong as stay still. We relied on approaches that once worked, assumed rational argument would be enough and defaulted to professional language and professional voices.

But people’s lives are not professional. They are personal, emotional, relational.

Changing the Conversation is not about abandoning evidence or policy. It is about recognising that stories shape whether evidence is heard, and whether policy is trusted. It is about grounding progressive ideas in everyday experience. It is about moving from talking at people to speaking with them. Above all, it is about participation. The stories we tell do not just influence what people think. They influence whether they show up at all.

If we want communities who feel left behind to step forward, we must start by listening and by telling better stories about the world we share.

Join us on the 5th of March for the Changing the Conversation webinar here.

Image: Airam Dato-on/Pexels