Launched by Richard Cole, a professor and chairman of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing, the internship culminated with a Friday morning presentation to executives from the organization.

“In this one week — it’s been very intense — they’ve given us a whole different experience, kind of like a real agency-client experience, in a way,” Sibiski said. “It’s just so cool doing something for a nonprofit organization — a good cause.”

Students were guided by Wally Snyder, president of the American Advertising Federation, and Mark Lantz, who played a major role in the creation of the Pure Michigan advertising campaign. The goal was to come up with an idea from which a child abuse prevention campaign could be built.

It’s a model called a brand manifesto, which was the basis of the Pure Michigan advertisements. Students worked around research that showed the public has been turned off to donating to child abuse organizations because of the negativity of previous advertising campaigns.

“It’s really an idea which is the beginning of an advertising campaign — an idea that will really change the way people think about child abuse,” Snyder said. “Now, everybody is focusing on the worst aspect — the criminal aspect — and the concept is that that is scaring people away from helping. There’s so much else involved here — making sure that children are not neglected, making sure they get good educations, making sure they get nutrition. So we need a new idea.”

During Friday’s presentations, executives and board members watched and took notes as the four groups of students presented the ideas that could be the baseline of a new campaign: For A Better Tomorrow. Raise Change. Every Child is Yours. Not Childhood.

The amount of creativity and energy that went into each of the ideas was impressive, said Michael Foley, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund, the Michigan chapter of Prevent Child Abuse America.

“(We have) struggled with how … we message this issue in a way that people understand that it’s fundamentally important that we address it and that people have a role in helping and communities have a role,” Foley said. “I’m very hopeful that out of this — we’re obviously going to spend more time, we’re going to look back at these again. I’m very hopeful that we’re going to be able to come up with kind of the brand manifestation that we can use to move forward.”