Coastal Horizons Wins 2025 Regroup Readiness Award in the Nonprofit Category

How One Team Transformed Communication Across One of North Carolina’s Largest Behavioral Health Nonprofits

About Coastal Horizons

For more than 55 years, Coastal Horizons Center, Inc. has been a cornerstone of behavioral health, prevention, and crisis intervention services across North Carolina. Serving communities across 48+ locations and 58 counties, the nonprofit supports individuals and families through mental health care, substance use treatment, crisis response, justice services, and youth and family programs.

With over 800 employees (and around 50 interns and part-time staff), Coastal Horizons operates at a scale where communication isn’t just operational—it’s mission-critical. When serving people in crisis, the ability to reach staff quickly and reliably can mean the difference between uncertainty and safety.

Want more Regroup success stories?
Access a PDF version of Coastal Horizons’ client story along with many others.

The Challenge: Scale Without Clarity

Despite its size and impact, Coastal Horizons faced a growing internal challenge: communication inefficiency.

Like many large nonprofits, the organization relied heavily on email for internal updates. But email alone wasn’t enough—especially during emergencies. Messages were delayed, overlooked, or buried in inboxes. Leadership knew the organization needed a better way to communicate across counties, programs, and roles.

Coastal Horizons had already invested in Regroup Mass Notification, a powerful platform designed for exactly these moments. The problem wasn’t the technology—it was adoption.

Early on, the system was underutilized. Staff were unsure how to use it, leadership questioned its value, and confidence in the tool never fully took hold. Regroup had everything Coastal Horizons needed, but it wasn’t yet delivering its full impact.

The Vision: Turning Doubt Into Momentum

That’s when Ryan Twiford, IT Application Specialist at Coastal Horizons, stepped in. Ryan was new to the Coastal Horizons team, but recognized something critical: “We didn’t have a technology problem—we had an internal implementation problem,” he shares.

Rather than replacing the platform, Ryan took ownership of the challenge. He set out to relaunch Regroup from the ground up, with a focus on people, not just software. His goal was simple but ambitious: rebuild trust in the platform and make it feel intuitive, useful, and essential to daily operations.

The Solution: A Human-Centered Relaunch

Working closely with the Regroup team—especially their customer success manager, Vivek—Ryan approached the relaunch as a true collaboration.

Together, they:

• Rebuilt the rollout strategy with simplicity and accessibility in mind
  
• Created step-by-step training materials and short, engaging tutorial videos
  
• Customized the Regroup interface to match Coastal Horizons’ branding, helping staff feel like it was their tool
  
• Launched a friendly internal campaign that emphasized why Regroup mattered—not just how it worked

Ryan even brought creativity and humor into the process, dressing up and walking office-to-office to help staff get comfortable with the platform. His message was clear and consistent, “We’re going to have fun, and we’re going to get this done!”

Early Results and a True Test: Hurricane Response

The impact of the successful relaunch of Regroup was almost instant. Within a short time, hundreds of employees signed up and verified their accounts. Supervisors began sending real-time updates across departments, and administrative teams replaced long email chains with instant, targeted alerts.

What once felt like fragmented communication was suddenly clear, fast, and reassuring. “After we did a proper implementation and rollout, it became clearer to everyone that Regroup had everything we needed—and even more,” shares Ryan

The true test of the system came when a major hurricane threatened the region shortly after the relaunch. Ryan stood at the ready to help leaders within the organization. He knew adoption was successful when he saw supervisors and teams logging in to send notifications and status updates on their own. Using Regroup as the central communication hub, Coastal Horizons sent real-time alerts about:

• Office closures
  
• Safety procedures
  
• Weather updates across multiple counties

Every message was delivered successfully, and every employee was reached in a timely fashion on their mobile devices. For the first time, the organization had complete confidence that its people were informed and safe.

That moment marked a cultural shift when skepticism turned into trust and leadership fully embraced the platform. Regroup wasn’t just working—it had become essential.

Life With Regroup Today

Today, Regroup is woven into the daily rhythm of Coastal Horizons. Employees use the mobile app on company-issued phones, with high adoption across the organization. The platform is used to send notifications about:

• Severe weather alerts
  
• IT outages
  
• Office and weather closures
  
• Suspicious activity notifications
  
• Safety incidents, evacuations, and active threat alerts

What once felt like a replaceable system now feels like a core component of the organization’s communications. Leaders and employees alike see Regroup as a reliable and dependable partner in facilitating better communication during emergency situations and every day.

Coastal Horizons is even expanding its roadmap to explore future use cases—including potential client-facing communication.

More Than Technology: A Shared Mission

“Because of Regroup, our internal organization was greatly improved,” Ryan shares. For him, this project was never just about software. Coastal Horizons’ mission—to promote healthier lives, stronger families, and safer communities—is deeply personal to him. That commitment is reflected in how he approached this work: with empathy, creativity, and persistence.

In 2025, Coastal Horizons won the Regroup Readiness Award for the organization’s use of Regroup to make a meaningful impact on safety and communication. Winning the Regroup Readiness Award represents more than professional recognition. Ryan and the Coastal Alert Team he worked with donated the award funds directly to the Coastal Horizons Open House Youth Shelter, which provides safety, shelter, and hope to unhoused children in the community.

“At the end of the day, that’s what communication and readiness are really about—taking care of people.” 

Ready to see Regroup in Action for yourself? Take a Virtual Tour today!