@edharris
Thanks for the quick response!
Well, if hiding the button is doable, I would still go for it, despite the title/image still linking to the event page. I can add a third-party link to the excerpt and hope that most folks will click that? Ideally I would add a button to the excerpt but from what I've read, that's going to be too difficult for my client to have to deal with each time they want to add an event.