Scalable TYPO3 Architecture for Global Nonprofit Success: The Hanns Seidel Foundation Case

The Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSS), founded in 1967 and headquartered in Munich, is a German political foundation affiliated with the Christian Social Union (CSU). It operates in the non-profit sector and is dedicated to promoting democracy, civic education, good governance, and sustainable development. With around 300 staff worldwide and offices in over 70 countries, HSS is one of the major political foundations in Germany, playing a key role in both national political education and international cooperation.

HSS sought an agency partner that combined deep TYPO3 expertise with extensive experience supporting large and complex nonprofit organizations. Ultimately, HSS decided to partner with in2code due to their experience with TYPO3, portfolio of work with public institutions, long-term stability, flexibility and custom solutions.

HSS was facing an aging website infrastructure that was no longer meeting performance and usability requirements. Their online presence and reach was negatively impacted due to their content-related SEO weaknesses and their overall lack of modern content structure and visibility in search engines. 

Their website came with a decentralized editorial set up which entailed users with access rights from over 70 countries. Overall, the infrastructure both internal and external would need to be modernized to enable streamlined workflows, improved accessibility and user experience. TYPO3 had been HSS’s CMS of choice since 2003, and it remained the ideal solution for the next phase of the project. Its advanced user rights management, scalability, extensive customization options, multilingual and multisite capabilities, and proven long-term stability made it the best fit for these evolving needs.

HSS aimed to optimize their existing website to simplify content management for their international teams. They partnered with in2code to modernize deployment and hosting, strengthen SEO and visibility, and deliver a high-performance, secure TYPO3 platform. To measure their success, HSS wanted to strengthen their tracking, analytics, and performance monitoring capabilities.

in2code modernized the TYPO3-based web platform, implementing improvements both strategically and technically across numerous areas of the website.

The HSS website had been operating on TYPO3 since 2003. in2code successfully upgraded their installation to TYPO3 v12 and completed an infrastructure migration via Terraform. Hosting was also migrated to a high-performance AWS cloud environment. A centralized TYPO3 instance was introduced with a multi-domain structure to support the editors located across 70+ countries. A subdomain-based architecture was also implemented, enabling country-specific projects to be managed within a single TYPO3 installation. This implementation allowed editors, regardless of their location, equal access and functionality for efficient, localized content management.

The user experience was improved with new call-to-action elements, visual UI enhancements and the introduction of a Magic Link login workflow. Special attention was given to the ongoing management of the extranet for scholarship recipients which includes features for secure document upload and submission. The news extension was also incorporated to distribute global news in an organized and efficient manner.

As a result of the new infrastructure, the user experience has significantly improved, as well as conversion rates for logins, event sign-ups, and publication orders. Visibility has been improved with a new record (in the SISTRIX index), exceeding 1.0 for the first time (as of December 2024). A new record for Google Search Console impressions was set with over 3 million impressions, again for the first time. This metric was obtained in February 2025 and shows impressive growth from the 800,000 impressions recorded in 2020. As a result of targeted content optimization, rankings for relevant keywords improved significantly, accompanied by substantial growth in Google search impressions and clicks for “Digitale Welt.”

in2code delivered a modern, efficient solution for HSS with ongoing TYPO3 development, feature expansion and content structuring via a long-term support contract. Through this contract, in2code will continue to monitor and maintain website interfaces for external systems, improving the UX/UI experience with an emphasis on accessibility and internationalization in mind. Continuous performance monitoring is achieved through a custom KPI dashboard. in2code remains a strategic and technical consultant on website structure and SEO.