Limit featured content length

Hi I just started building a site with this theme (love it!) I'm trying to use the featured content on the home page to link to pages which will have registration forms for various events, is there a way to limit the amount of text that gets excerpted and put on the front page, or to just have the headline perhaps - the problem that I'm running into is that the shortcode for my form is showing up in the featured content on the homepage. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - www.bocazoo.com (please excuse the roughness - trying to get the shell built, waiting on content from the marketing folks)