Is there a better way of doing this? (conditional use of Event Calendar plugin)

I am using the Event Calendar plugin to display up coming events in the sidebar of my blog. The thing is that a lot of the time, there aren’t any up-coming events, so I don’t really want a box near the top of my sidebar saying “No events” – I’d prefer if it just disappeared in these circumstances.

Anyway, I searched the plugin documentation & found no obvious solution for this – so ended up creating some PHP code to capture the output & show the output conditionally depending on what it contained.

<?php ob_start(); ?>
 <?php ec3_get_events(5); ?>
 <?php $events_list = ob_get_contents(); ?>
<?php ob_end_clean(); ?>
<?php if (!strstr($events_list,'No events')) : ?>
 <li class="events">
  <h2>Upcoming Events</h2>
   <ul>
    <?php echo $events_list; ?>
   </ul>
  </li>
<?php endif; ?>

The question is – is this a sensible way of doing what I’m trying to achieve? Or is there a more obvious way that I’m missing?