Convened by BioData.pt, the first workshop of the ELIXIR-funded Staff Exchange Project entitled “Empowering ELIXIR Nodes to measure and communicate their performance and impact” took place on January 30th, in Lisbon (Portugal). A total of 17 participants, including Portuguese and international stakeholders from Norway, Italy, Spain and Czech Republic, met to build their capacity in performance and impact assessment of research infrastructures in the life sciences. After brief presentations introducing the topic, participants took part in interactive sessions built around the methodology being developed by the RI-PATHS project consortium. This allowed non-specialists in the field of impact evaluation to "get started with performance and impact assessment", thereby empowering them to apply this approach to evaluate the performance and impact of their research infrastructure activities. Two follow-up workshops are in the planning: to "develop and refine” the approach with additional ELIXIR countries (in March 2020, convened by ELIXIR Italy) and to “test and showcase” the approach (Bergen, in May 2020, convened by ELIXIR Norway). For further information on this project, please contact its coordinator: Ana Portugal Melo, Deputy Head of Node for ELIXIR Portugal, ammelo@igc.gulbenkian.pt.