Get Real - performing representation and impact in the digital age

Riding the waves of technological development under rampant market capaitalism, recent decades have seen the rise of individualised political engagement rooted in forms of identity. In response, new political organisations have emerged, employing digital technologies to activate citizens around particular moments, issues or campaigns. Dubbed the “Move On Effect”, after a prominent American organisation, the rise of these organisations reshaped how political organisations connect with potential supporters and receive funding. In Australia, digital campaigning organisation (DCO) GetUp! embodied these developments, achieving widespread salience through issue and political campaigning and pioneering the adoption of digital communication technologies by civil society organisations. The embrace of digital technologies by citizens and organisations has, via a variety of digital media platforms, facilitated mass engagement between people and organisations. Through connectivity, these platforms facilitate organisation, which can be crowd- or organisation-enabled, and which are also fluid. As people have increasingly engaged with and connected to issues rather than organisations, the connections are, at least initially, increasingly transactional and non-binding. Digital campaigning organisations like GetUp! have achieved incredible growth and prominence via this expressive and non-binding approach to political mobilisation. However, as they have grown and consolidated, the resources required to sustain these organisations have increased. This form of mobilisation has lost its initial novelty, adopted by a broader array of actors within an increasingly crowded field (Hall et al. 2025). And as technologies continue to evolve, emergent digital platforms and organisational logics have required digital campaigning organisations to adapt to each new form of the internet in order to maintain relevance. Thus, in just a few short decades, the landscape and context has created new organisational forms and practices which themselves have faced pressures to evolve. Using GetUp! as an exploratory case study, this paper explores what these trends mean in terms of organisational legitimacy. We argue that emergent practices in the digital era have shifted legitimacy to the realm of perception and performance. To influence decision-makers, political organisations need only to provide the perception that they are broadly representative of important interests; to continue to receive funding, they only need to persuade enough people that what the organisation does is meaningful. While these impressions may be grounded in measurable effects, a convincing enough performance can achieve the same organisational ends. In order to highlight how legitimacy can be performed, we make use of a variety of GetUp!’s publicly available communication, including annual reports, media releases and parliamentary submissions. This is complemented by contrasting external sources of information, such as references to GetUp! in various media sources, academic literature and parliamentary references in Hansard. Generally, we use GetUp!’s emergence and evolution as a digital campaigning organisation to illustrate ways in which modern organisations can endeavour to perform representation and impact to realise organisational goals.