Introducing Embedded Democracy

What we know, and don't know, about this community so far

If you’re reading this, you’re interested in how democracy can be better.

You might have arrived here from Vote for Policies, the pioneering organisation that all but invented voter advice tools more than 15 years ago. We’ve known the VfP team for most of that time, and we were genuinely honoured when they asked us to rebuild the VfP product on our platform two years ago. That collaboration culminated in helping nearly a million people make informed decisions at the last General Election.

It’s deeply sad to see Vote for Policies close its doors after so many years of public service. But it’s an understandable decision — both for the organisation and for its founder, Matt — and one that reflects a hard truth: building sustainable civic tech is harder than ever.

The biggest challenge in the space isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s a lack of sustainable funding. And that’s something we’ve had to think hard about.

Like VfP, we believe everyone deserves the right to impartial, accurate, and accessible political guides, the kind that meet people where they are and help them understand the choices in front of them.

As their chapter closes, it feels like the right moment for us to speak publicly about what we’re building next — and why.

Who we are

We’re Jeremy and Matt (not that Matt, it’s confusing, we know), co-founders of Embeddables, a startup we founded in London eight years ago. Today, Embeddables is a low-code website builder. But back then, it was something much closer to what Vote for Policies was doing. In fact most of our early years were devoted to civic tools.

Before we teamed up, Matt was a political speechwriter and Jeremy was a journalist. We met on Twitter during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, where we discovered a shared passion for helping people better understand what they were voting for — and against.

In 2017, we launched GE2017, a voter advice tool designed with Matt’s younger sister in mind. It ended up being used by over 2 million people, a record at the time. Since then, we’ve built dozens of prototypes exploring what a more participatory, more empowering civic tech future might look like. Along the way, we’ve partnered with others — including VfP — to share our tech and ideas.

This is our passion. It’s why we started working together, and it’s still what drives us to work at what we do.

Why a website builder?

People often ask us why we’re building civic tech through a company that makes websites.

The answer comes in two parts.

Firstly, we’re building a sustainable business model for civic tech. We’ve always believed that there’s no point building social tech if it’s not sustainable - no matter how good it is, it needs to survive in the long-run.

It needs a business model to support it, and most business models end up being misaligned with the mission sooner or later: charge users for your product and most people can’t afford it; run ads and your platform will gradually degrade in quality and truthfulness.

So Embeddables has a different model: earn money from a related business-to-business product (selling software for other companies to build their websites), while using that revenue and product to build what we really want to build, with no compromises.

And secondly, we’re building an engine that can experiment its way to the right solutions. Civic tech is hard to build — it needs to gently but firmly nudge people to engage in a healthy way with their society, while informing them in the process, all while competing with social media for their attention.

That means it takes time, and experimentation, to get it right. Our website builder allows us to design, prototype and test an idea with users at speed, so that we have a fighting chance of hitting on products that will really bring about positive change. It gives us more shots on goal.

The Facebooks of the world win the attention of voters by having deep pockets and running hundreds of experiments every week — degrading not just our mental health but our democracy in the process. This is our attempt to fight back.

What this community is

So - what exactly are we building? The honest answer is: we’re still figuring it out.

We have a long list of prototypes we’ve built, are building, or want to build — from smarter voter advice tools to new interfaces for journalism, AI-powered voting assistants, interactive policy explainers, and more.

But great civic tools don’t start with code. They start with people. With conversations and stories. With frustrations that become insights, and insights that become ideas. Some of the most impactful products we’ve launched began not with a wireframe, but with a conversation about what someone wished existed.

Last year, we hit a major milestone: profitability. That means we now have the ability to reinvest heavily in building tools for democracy. The more Embeddables succeeds, the more we can explore, prototype, and build the civic tech we think the world needs.

Introducing Embedded Democracy

This is our attempt to turn a small, informal network — of friends, collaborators, civic-minded people, and (yes) our mums — into a broader and more intentional community.

We want to share what we’re building. We want your feedback. We want to know what you’re missing in the current system — and what you imagine could exist instead. We want you to shape what we build.

We’ve got the resources and the product. You’ve got the lived experience, insight, and imagination. This community is where we bring those together.

If that sounds exciting to you — we’d love to have you.